Something Else
 
When I looked out of the window for the last time,
I saw that the back lawn had turned to water.
It must have happened around dusk.
 
It was not an ocean, dizzy with froth and salt,
it was something else, something as deep as a
man is tall - deeper in fact, so that the man
 
could stand unseen below the surface. Since dusk,
great skeins of dank weed must have bloomed,
because the water had a thickness to it, a slowness
 
like folded oil. I thought of the things I’d left
strewn on the lawn: my beach chair, my favourite glass,
the book I would now never finish. I tutted.
 
In the sky, dark stripes had formed
in anticipation of a rose moon. Oddly, the moon
was a no-show. The air hummed to itself.
 
Nina Parmenter

If you have any thoughts on this poem,  Nina Parmenter would be pleased to hear them.