The Flood

Bullet rain
Beats the landscape
Familiar sound
Overhead
Carry on
All is normal
Off to class
Through sleeted norm

Day presses on
And so do bullets
The grey sky,
Continuously
Pelts its burden
But all is normal
All is fine

Then gentle bedlam
Students gossip
And lunchtime brings
A mudded dance

Lighthearted students
Leap to the rhythm
In brown stained ignorance
Photos snapped

Then somethings off balance
Lunch ends abruptly
Students gather
On puddled floors

And then the chaos
Sirens flash past
Phone calls and radios
Crunching cars

Children swept up
In parents panic
No signing out
The school is grey

The uninformed
Wait in classrooms
Watching,
Cars,
Watching,
Rain,

Then the announcements
This roads closed
That one

Civil state of emergency
Still students sit

Then my own knight comes
Without explanation,
Swept up in vehicle
Military arms

Then it comes
Understanding, flooding
As Im driven through
The broken town

Clay-colored rivers
Engulf the parklands
Roads drown
In rain, in dirt,

And the traffic tumbles
In panicked fleeing
As suited men flee suited town

Vans are packed
With families,
Chaos,
New friends are tossed
Among the loved

And then the centre,
The shops,
The colors,
All drowning in
Unfamiliar brown,

The river bank
On which Ive shared times
Is gone

And the reality sinks in

And then Im home,
At least in business
And the store is empty,

Bullets pelt down

We shut our lights off,
Its only two though,
And business is closed
First time
In
Thirty years

Then we pack
Into the vehicle and join
The mass
Of fleeing ties

Past the harbor,
Yachts tossing on moorings
Dinghy drowned
And trees bobbing past

Traffic crawls us
We see slow motion
Cars drowned in puddles
Rusting, lost

And after the snails pace,
We come to the country
Fields of water,
And carved land pool

The pine, the oak trees,
Ripped from their standing,
Settled in deep
Scarred mounds of land

And empathy
Sudden understanding
It is a flood

Just like those past seen
But never to us,
The people of the North,

At last the home stretch
After hours of waiting
Our home,
Our safety,
The place we belong,

We turn down our road,
Relief paints our faces
But alas it is not
Struggles end
Yet

There
Barring homestretch
Land builds the roadway

Garden extended to taste
Graveled road

Sighs glum our faces
And we reverse to the long way,
And when we return

The relief is worn grey

Like the scarred land,
And the scarred people,
The waterfalled hillsides
and snatching seas

Now it is time
To find
Somewhere brother
Swept in the current
To places unknown

But he is found
And all is at peace then

The bullets still pelt
And the land is still scarred
But we sleep soundly,
Awaiting the next day,
The sweet aftermath
Rain backdrops our sleep.

Then we awake here,
School is cancelled,
Slowly rising,
Past day comes back

And so, we step out there
All seems as normal,
But the rain has cut deep
And we are all still scarred
Though the bullets,
Themselves
Are gone.

And all that I see,
From drying window,
Is the green sea
Clay-stained

One with the land.