The earth had not been breathing
For an hour when I woke,
So the thought that I’d be leaving
Any time, became a joke,
There was not that faintest rustle
That we think to call a breeze,
When the leaves all rub together with
The swaying of the trees,
And the water lay in stagnant pools
Across the dying ground,
Where there once had flowed a river but
Its stream could not be found.

There was silence where there once had been
The babble of a creek,
If the earth turned on its axis now
That day took half a week,
And where the tide had used to turn,
Advance upon the land,
Its waves had ceased to function
All it left was drying sand,
If that was not enough, its dearth
Reflected in the sky,
In clouds dark brown like bracken
That would crackle up on high.

These clouds of louring thunder merely
Muttered in their pain,
And sent the flash of lightning down
But dry, and without rain,
And nothing that was living stirred
Within my line of view,
Not even what I should have heard
And so, I turned to you.
For there across the counterpane
Your lustrous hair was spread,
And all my world became insane
To know that you were dead.

David Lewis Paget