Fire and Flood

Fire comes, and with it, water;
We are consumed by one while another
Carries away everything.

What is the difference? What is gone is gone.

Here, it rained and a flood swept away the road home;
Sand and rubble fanned like scree down a hillside.

In a spade’s thrust, cutting the bank
To let the water through, to save
Our stone houses and ourselves
One broken sod fell revealing a nest
Of blind mice. Three squirming young
Gone in the torrent, oblivious to fate,
Not even knowing that life could be so short.

Elsewhere, fire came in the early hours
And later, useless water quenched nothing.
Flames’ thirst engulfed itself, its hunger
Devoured an entire building, floor to roof.

There was neither rhyme nor reason to the flames rising,
No pulse, no rhythm, neither pause nor cadence.
Unrelenting, the pillar of fire by night,
Of cloud by day, rose before us.

It led us nowhere; guidance had absented itself;
Without a sign or a road to follow, we were all forsaken.

Futile water rained us all to hell
Barely cooled the walls where so many
Abandoned souls suffocated and withered:
A hundred repetitions of personal apocalypse.

So few of us could even glimpse them then,
Tumbling into oblivion, so few could even
Reach out with the least sorrow in the end.

Fire and flood, and the safety
We had thought would protect us,
Was squandered in blind moments
Long before today, when eyes were already
Averted, the odds calculated, as if life
And those who live it in less remembered
Stairwells and forgotten halls were just
The reckoning of some actuarial sum.

Fire and flood may come by accident or bad design,
And after flooding grief, the fire of anger follows it.

© BH, 2017

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I’d almost caught up with June’s complement of poems. Then Grenfell Tower happened. 

Something is badly wrong here and the repercussions will run and run. 

For my part, I began to channel this at six AM this morning. Here it is. My two pence worth.