The Tuesday Poem

Terremoto

(Italy 2009)

Today I felt the earth shudder

under my bare foot and

my head was dizzy as a ship at sea.

A cup shuffled along the shelf

and a green lemon dropped from the tree and rolled

across the cracked marble of the terrace.

For a second I was arrested

in the moment of lifting a jug of iced

water that slopped over the rim onto my toes.

The roof-tiles chattered as if

someone was running a thumb along the edge

of a deck of cards at Scopa.

And then a pause - everything still.

A breeze fluttering the leaves of the olive trees.

Everything as it was before - except

that the rock I am standing on has shifted

two centimetres further south and,

bare-foot, jug in hand, I have moved with it.

I wrote this when I was living in Italy last year.  Earth tremors are common there, but we also had a couple of quite big earth tremors in England too.  The poem is still a work in progress - it takes me a long time to get from a collection of images or ideas to the finished thing.  With this one, I haven't yet managed to get beyond description.