Future Floodlands

Through the sky’s high window

the sun stains this moment of ground

green with the shapes of grass

between shadows of paths.

 

We have wrapped ourselves in air,

a tremble of voices breathing

a shimmer of words, a breeze

stirring the gauze of thought.

 

The past is stone, its entrance

a memory of Rome, a fragment,

an aqueduct of faith, crossing

from unseen Eden to unseen paradise.

 

The waves of people listen to the rustle of time,

the murmuring music of lives, the trees

rising like vapour to the foliage of clouds,

at the meeting of stories and rain.

 

The future is water: the raging elements;

beaches, and islands, and boats; the mind washed clean

of what it has done; silence

when the right words could have turned the tide.

 

And sailing east, its stern of netted glass high

beneath the stone poop, the Hope is lodged

by the rising flood between the piers,

turned all angles to the sunset sky.