Doggerland

When swamped Noah’s Wood
has re-seeded above sea rises –
when it has been reinstated –
that connection

of Britain [no more a stoic island
able to gorge on separation
& cry out a huge difference]
would be fixed

Such an implausible conceit –
with our warming & tipping concerns
seeing fast incursions of salt water –
no reunification is possible

Slumped & washed by a North Sea rush –
yet to return are men & women –
hot in our blood/ They sleep in silt/
We were never an island race

By Windover Hill

No rich patron for St Andrew’s Church,
unmoved by digging at historical facts,
dropped, slumped, almost marooned,
leaving it off-centred on Alfriston’s Tye,

a cross set high on a rough mound,
above the bezier-curves of The Ouse,
of her flood-carved meanders,
kept from the village by a low flint wall,

this house sits, quiet, above the tide,
that moon’s claim upon timed rises,
which shift according to typed charts,
there is more than one God working here.

This low Cathedral of the Downs
will always be half-framed by the slope
of that grazed slant of Windover Hill,
unsure of the Long Man’s presence.

Inspired by – Keith Pettit


Published in Flights Poetry – https://flightsscc.wordpress.com/