Challenging Poetry

entering flood season

consider as rain falls,
day after day,
week after week,
rising ankle deep—
knee deep,
waist deep—
consider how precious it is.

here, where water
flows and gathers,
we shunt it away
into the spaces between roads
spill ways and swamps, and
pools hidden by wisteria
and magnolias and dogwoods,
hiding it, keeping it away.
we are spoiled by abundance.

but water is precious.
and in dryer corners, where floods
rise and fall
in hours instead of weeks,
and plants horde water,
before it disappears in heat waves,
sucked into desert
instead of shunting it away
it's gathered, used up
over and over.

we're here, in the flood.
water doesn't feel
precious. it rises
neck deep,
chin deep—rising until
everything drowns,
grass and trees and telephone
poles and power lines and
houses, undermined,
floating away.

soon the world
will be overrun
with water. and we will
tiptoe across bridges
with water flowing inches beneath,
and face roads turned river
until our dreams turn
to water, flowing,
rising, while the rain falls.
so precious.
so deadly.
nightmare made life.

line count: 48

I think this one came out of driving through the roads during flash flooding and the dreams that came afterward. And being born in Arizona but living in Tennessee.