This Isn't the Sort of Thing That Happens to Someone Like You

to the sea it once was.

Sometimes it will be rain, swelling the rivers until they break

through

and rush over the fields,

settling across hundreds of acres for weeks at a time,

sky below as well as above, clouds & seabirds gliding overhead

sky above as well as below, clouds & seabirds gliding overland.

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Or snow will cover everything, blocking drains & roads,

……….

Mothers forbidding their children to leave the house.

Lost children in the fields.

You said you don’t remember your mother telling you to go out,

but you would have been too young to remember/to go out.

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Sometimes the fog

will

come in with

the

floods and

our world

will

become

unmappable, alien,

precarious.

I didn’t say you said it was my fault

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These same floods that obliterate bring life to the land, make

our soil the richest in the country.

At ploughing time the smell of the earth hangs in the air,