But she did not.
Overland she gained power, stalling over a city and sucking in the warmth.
Sea temperatures higher and higher and also the air : levels rising and threatening.
Oil refineries put out like candles.
Whole countries ransacked and uprooted.
And only a matter of time before the floods come here again.
We invest in debt. We invest in properties fragile as balsa wood ; build to sell not to last.
We dub so many 'failures' , then wonder why they end up living this out, turning to substances to dumb their days of dread.
They hear voices commanding them to leave, out into the raw, pounding rain.
There are so many forms and everyone just one click away from being cut off.
We carry on buying, but to what purpose?
When we stop the shutters go up and windows never come back. Empty buildings are fit and ready for more hurricanes on the way.
In the centre of the city a young man whirls with a machete like a small tornado .
After offices and shops have opened, it's the morning sleepers.....
Rough?
A gentle enough word, suggesting stubble and surface.
What better one?
Wreck-wanderers?
Only one click away from them.
If there were some important event here - one to bring in the world - they'd have to be swept away.
The Council would have to deploy a giant broom the size of their Roald Dahl inflatable peach.
Swept in one big tumble of human heap into a vast hole ( somewhere up valley and away) once an opencast mine, which the company failed to landscape.
A black crater.
A jumble of limbs.
Dust and waste the colour of a storming sky.
TIDELINES
Bladderwrack prickly, podded,
thick tar sticky,
always the plastic,
punnets from cargo
and , occasionally, smoothed
eroded driftwood bodies.
Shells of every kind,
yet these are soft
as tissue in wind and rain,
card and cloth
not chalk and lime.
The sea that has risen
brought them miles inland
deposited in towns and cities
in subways and doorways,
expressions already drowned,
bedraggled and sodden
from the struggle to land.
We step aside, around,
our bags are anchoring,
we have timetables
and vital destinations ;
this clutter-kind
are not of our making :
our telescope eyes, sails of skin.