Poem by the Dutch writer Rien Vroegindeweij

The flood

I

Somewhere in a house in a street

a child learnt a word, a word that it had never

heard before, the word: flood.

His mother shouted it, it resounded ominously

through the house, the boy looked outside

in fright and saw his street, his Sunday street,

where the cold morning lay between the houses.

His father switched on the radio: the broadcaster

spread the message that menaced his world

over the empty land, past the houses being built

where the limepit lay drying like a tautly stretched

sheet, and further behind the greenhouses of

the market gardener that glinted in the pale February light.

As far as he could see his world was dry.

Where was the water that belonged to the flood?

III

The boy waited for the things that were to come.

His father put the stove on the table, his mother

took furniture upstairs. Then the waiting started.

The waiting for the flood. It came as a great grey

monster that rolled out wide across the building site

over the fallowland towards the house where he lived.

He heard the cellar fill, the doors were creaking

the monster rose higher and higher, came up the stairs.

He was frightened. His father measured how high it came.

II

The word had become water

a wildly raging sea sought

the depths of the polders

filled the wells and springs

and rainwater cisterns

of the sleeping houses and farmsteads

rose in the villages and hamlets

forced its way into the sheds where the cowering

cattle tugged at their halters and ropes

walls collapsed, attics and rafters

lost their anchorages, floated off

with men, women and children

like shaky flatboats towards graspable

straws and branches that stuck up

like deceptively saving hands

out of the awesomely seething flood

that deluged the earth.

IV

Abyss called to abyss

corpse to corpse, flags

of sheets fluttered on roofs.

Was it God’s furious spirit

punishing with the scourge of the waters

or had people not been vigilant?

Each person independently asked the questions

that arose when the storm died down

when the dead were counted.