Craterface

One in six homes at risk of flooding this winter

The Guardian, 2 November 2012

Early morning in my parents’ council house

with its gravelly rendering, its pimply

glass which so reminds me of frozen slugs.

Overnight the road outside has been flushed

clean away, a sewer imploding last night

beneath what had been a leaf-choked drain.

The crater is huge, like an imprint made

by a giant alien craft with one invisible

limb, lunging about in the night unseen.

Imagine the potholes where that came from!

And it could be inside the crater stalking me—

up in the blood-streaked sky I half expect

to see the earth where the moon should be.

Tonight I’ll sellotape over the mirror in case

it cracks at first sight of an alien face.

(c) 2012 Slush Poet

The price of tea

Britain on renewed flood alert after wettest April on record

The Telegraph, 1 May 2012

This, my husband, I have heard, that over in England

they suffer too. Even their judiciary can be swept away

on a surge. I read in the Hindi Times of a judge

who was drowned when his Jaguar plunged

into a swollen Hampshire tributary, to be found

later dead as a log, clinging to his faithful hunting hound.

Such, my husband, are our blessings.

We who sailed on the roof of the Brahmaputra ferry

found no electric windows or central lockings

kaput and blocking our escape, and for the losses

of our livings have been promised two whole lakh!

So, husband, when I am fished from the flood,

and sorted from the flotsam, I shall be revealed

your surviving wife, clinging to your bloated hide.

(c) 2012 Slush Poet

Ways of coping with loss

Death and disasters don’t make much difference to Lloyd’s of London bosses

Simon English writing in The Independent, 29 March 2011

A city tailor's clients sifting beans in the old

Lime Street coffee shop get misty eyed.

That great collapse of 2011 was when

we last felt alive, we mattered then —

shat ourselves in the fall, but made a killing

when the dust had settled. This new lot though

make 9/11 look like an act of God.

You can look away or lend a hand,

an ear or a voice, you can pick

over the bones of the fallen,

try on their shoes, make hay on the cheap

meat, hold the line or let it slip

through your fingers, become inured to it all

or insure it away like those men in fine suits.

Christchurch shook us, all that rubble,

it could have been St Andrew Undershaft,

and their dead looked just like us.

Not like Thailand, a sodden orange rag

snagged on a wallowing log shaped curiously

like the Buddha, (karmic comeuppance

for sex on the beach?) or the Japanese

fishing boats dry-docked in villages

landlocked by salt lakes that once were paddies.

Three billion pounds the lot, paid out in full

at a loss. Corks are popping nonetheless

in city bars because, like those fortunate

unfortunates, the suits are fully insured

and assured an excellent vintage this year.

(c) 2012 Slush Poet