wandering across Doggerland
I took it for granted the world
was the shape that it is next minute
here I am sitting on a bus
in Cannon Park
wondering if it’ll take me
to the town centre (as it says
on the front) or to
the verge of extinction
to be carried away
by a flood or burnt in a forest fire
a crisp cadaver
indistinguishable from a log
to all but a pathologist
(and there won’t be many of them around
in the last days of the dharma)
I want to go back
to fishing in
the Silverpit Lake
to watching the sunrise
from the summit of Saturn Reef
to mapping songlines
on the seabed
that make some kind of sense
of the world as I saw it then
wandering across Doggerland
Dominic Rivron
.