It's Still Life

Touchstones and Shifty Natures

That side of the hill
was a dirt slide
after it was logged clear,
though the loggers claimed
the land was of shifty nature,
but it turned into a seething
body waging war on fifty or

so families who called this
dirt home. Hindsight knew
it a fat belly begging to heave.
And there’s a cherub-plump
man standing beside me saying
there’ll be hell to pay for this –
our testing nature, and I nod,

a strange disbelief in physics –
gravity. Bloody inevitability .
And sure enough that hill
let lose like an undone corset
in a flood of messy-coloured
mud and fury. Swallowed up
a whole town in a tongue lashing.

Nature on a mission to claim
back what was its own, I suppose.

1) Day 12 NovPAD “transformations” and 2) Wordle #325 (words below). WSDOT: image is “Lidar” scanning of land slip that killed 43 people in Oso.body, fury, lesson, disbelief, test, dirt, mission, clear, taunting, pay, war, slide