Mudbricks

Humans, like water, flow down from the hills
To the lowest and easiest level to settle –
On floodplains and coastlines, the habitat fills
With the tides of the houses that sprout-up like petals.
Until, as the towns and the centuries grow
There must come a reckoning one stormy May,
As the flood meets the flood – so the undertow
Shall sink all the streets that stand in its way.

We have to live somewhere, but so does the water,
And so we must share the valleys and lakes –
In a constant battle of marsh and mortar,
To raise-up the levee before it breaks.
The humans are clever, but the river is long,
And gravity draws then both to ground –
So the silt is as soft as the stones are strong,
Till the continents rise or the roofs are drowned.

From Mighty Acorns…

As a child, I’d wander Hundred Acre Wood
On the pages made from paper from its trees.
I heard that they chopped it down right where it stood
Because the bears were eating all the bees.
But I later learned that it never had grown at all,
There was no-such place, it was all just make-believe,
Or some said that it did in the pencil and the scrawl
Of the author who had plucked it out of his sleeve.

Pooh wouldn’t care, of course,
He knew the woods he knew –
But he isn’t here to ponder
Where his fav’rite forest grew.

I heard some people claim it lives within,
That we carry it, us all, inside our minds.
But since we can’t agree on where our common thoughts begin,
Then the woods we’re thinking of are diff’rent kinds.
And some say it simply is a real wood in Surrey
Which has only undergone a change of name.
But others say an inspiration source is far too blurry
To be ever thought as all-one-and-the-same.

Pooh wouldn’t care, of course,
The trees were just the trees –
But he isn’t here to wander-off
To put me at my ease.