Tewkesbury Floods
In Summer I played in the mowing grass
Among the buttercups, the cornflowers and daisies,
And listened to the chaffinch sing.
I saw fields hedged with tall elm trees and briar
Crowned in white clouds and warm in the Gloucestershire sun.
Moving on . . . The elm trees have gone.
Most are now dead. Just
a few linger on.
A plain, flat and featureless, save one great tower
And that’s all that there is until you look lower
Encircled by hills and three rivers that flood.
(One of them once ran ruddy with blood)
Moving back by nine centuries, St Mary’s has stood
Proud on an island just clear of the flood
For the builders precisely knew just where the land
Was best to let the huge Abbey stand.
Just above levels of flood and of tide
The Abbey stays dry with no water inside.
Moving back by five centuries to half-timbered houses
Crammed along streets and forced down dark alleys
The shopkeepers, butchers, chandlers and bakers.
A market was here which sold cattle and sheep
(and the fruit from the Vale that you hoped you’d buy cheap)
Still the rivers outside the town didn’t run deep.
A century back the world fell in pieces around
And cars, trucks and tarmac covered the ground.
More people! More
houses! Oh! Why don’t we build
The houses in suburbs where flood land was tilled?
Now, when it rains hard, they sandbag the doors.
There’s mud in the kitchen and dirt on the stairs.
Last year was worse, you can tell by that stain
On the wall. But alas,
every year, homes are flooded again.
No cornflowers are left in the mowing grass high,
The Abbey looks down where I played, and men sigh.
For hundreds of years, old Tewkesbury was dry
But now every winter the water comes by.
