AFTER LONDON

The silence deepens.

As if it were a living being
it forages in the forest.

The next step taken
takes me out of the present

into history
into fantasy

as if I have become
a fairy story.

Tropes trooping through
the clearing.

The huff and puff
of a big bad wind.

The silence broken.

Inside  the belly
of the forest

where green is
the only colour seen

lies a partly
digested house.

Vines snaking through
its empty windows.

Its roof thrown
upon its floor.

Its wall crumbling
back into nature.

I sit and read my
Richard Jefferies.

A finger of frond
reading along with me

eager to turn
the next page.

The silence
deepens.


*


Richard Jefferies...he of the beautiful nature writing that influenced the nature writing of poet Edward Thomas.

Jefferies's novel, After London (1885), can be seen as an early example of "post-apocalyptic fiction": after some sudden and unspecified catastrophe has depopulated England, the countryside reverts to nature, and the few survivors to a quasi-medieval way of life.

The house gone to ruin that nature takes back is my memory of numerous houses I have come across including even one on the island of Lampedusa.