Emily Carr

Every Creeping Thing

Stand legs in buckets/ move your soft things upstairs/ they are issuing warnings/ the Severn is rising/ they say/ 90% of our floodplains don’t drain/ we’ve dredged our rivers of rait/ filtered our wetlands/ our dictionaries/ of words that ground us/ in knowing this land/ News flash/ in 14 hours/ 2 months of rain/ Flash floods will come/ and go/ but what we must know/ is the slow creep/ through the grey veil of concrete/ we have paved too much/ of the ham and the warth/ The water is rising/ like a warning from God/ but no one can walk across it/ and wet their feet/ All you can do is wait/ you are just a soft thing/ move upstairs/ watch the moon rising/ shed her grey veil into the shimmering field/ try to sleep/ until you are rising/ in the dauby air of the dawn/ Stand legs bare/ at the foot of the stairs/ Hear water souse your door/ Plant your palm on the flagstone floor/ is it eeve or just cold/ has the outside seeped in/ to show how thin is this membrane/ between your veil of skin and the fretted pelt of the earth 

* Rait: The refuse brought up the Severn by the ‘bore’ tide and deposited on the river bank.

* Ham: A level common pasture near a river or stream. 

* Warth: A flat meadow on the banks of the Severn.

* Dauby: Damp.

* Eeve: Damp of walls or stone floors, a sign of rain or great heat.

*Fretted: Worn away.

 Definitions from the 1890 glossary of Gloucestershire dialect

Emily Carr founded and runs Change the Word poetry collective with Good Chance Theatre, and previously ran the writing programmes for First Story, including launching National Writing Day UK. Emily won first prize in the Cheltenham Poetry Festival competition 2021 and her poetry has been published in Acumen and The Missing Slate.