North-Easterly Gale: London

Rhona McAdam
From:   Cartography. Oolichan, 2006.

Another night of wind crawls down my chimney
to boast of its own exploits: the cars it has blown into the sea,
the streets it has swept clean of garbage; it has worked hard
to shift the western coastline east by one iota, and scrape us
one grain closer to the continent.
                                                       It has blown this English
into French; one day its returning cousin will whisper storms
in Esperanto and we will all
understand.
                        This wind is blowing us to Denmark
where the travelling dune moves across Jutland at a grain's pace
and one day it will roll its mile-wide belly across the roads,
as it buried the church to the steeple.
                                                       One day it will follow you in
to your little red-roofed house, it will not let you
shut it out, it will puff and puff and occupy
your town, you will find yourself
blown to a village
at the tip of the world.

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Rhona McAdam's works copyright © to the author.