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The Guardian - UK
The Guardian - UK
Environment

A climate change poem for today: Vertigo by Alice Oswald

Rain

May I shuffle forward and tell you the two minute life of rain

Starting right now lips open and lidless-cold all-seeing gaze

When something not yet anything changes its mind like me

And begins to fall

In the small hours

And the light is still a flying carpet

Only a little white between worlds like an eye opening after an operation

No turning back
each drop is a snap decision

A suicide from the tower-block of heaven

And for the next ten seconds
The rain stares at the ground

Sees me stirring here
As if sculpted in porridge

Sees the garden in the green of its mind already drinking

And the grass lengthening

Stalls ...

Maybe a thousand feet above me
A kind of yellowness or levity
Like those tiny alterations that brush the legs of swimmers
Lifts the rain a little to the left

No more than a flash of free-will
Until the clouds close their options and the whole melancholy air surrenders to pure fear and ... falls

And I who live in the basement
one level down from the world
with my eyes to the insects with my ears to the roots listening

I feel them in my bones these dead straight lines
Coming closer and closer to my core

This is the sound this is the very floor
Where Grief and his Wife are living looking up

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