What lies beneath the surface

below the wake of cheerful pleasure craft

and the hopeful lures of anglers

this privileged day of summer?

the old village now lies silenced

its windowless buildings

have wide open doors

that permit brown trout

to enter and leave

this street of skulls

forgotten in the march of progress

stepped over by big money

eels coil around the rusted railings

that contain the cemetery

the dead sleeping

the disturbed sleep

of new surroundings

the chapel

eyeless

wordless

the new wildlife in its pews

that does not understand

it had gasped its last hosannas

in bubbles of oxygen

that escaped its ancient walls

on the day it succumbed to deluge

the final ministration of loss

pike skulk in the classrooms

of the primary school

silt is forming over the white lines

of its playground

the lilt of lullabies

the echo of children’s boisterous songs

stifled by millions of litres

of industrialised water

the shop had been run by

a man surnamed “Shop”

on its shelves

Great Pond Snails colonise

large glass jars

that used to dispense

sherbet fountains

Parma violets

and pink and white mice

the pigeon holes at the post office

have become the domain

of smooth newts and gudgeon

managing as efficiently in their way

as had the former postmistress

who was nicknamed “Post”

the practical and descriptive

naming conventions of a people

who had loved to describe

in an inaccessible corner of the lake side

a sheep wool-snagged

barbed wire-topped fence

disappears into the depths

still taut

still connecting the abandoned homes

to the life that persists on the hillside