As the end of March draws closer, we watch and wait.
With the silence of the absent waves before a tsunami, we’re holding our breath and watching the shore. It’s easy to be sucked into such a pause. The quiet is deafening, there are no birds. The waiting is hypnotic and fixes you stationary where you stand.
Once the wave breaks though, should we still be standing, there will be much to do. So we have been making ready, encouraging others to higher ground and doing what we can.
Life will continue after the big wave, even as it lays waste to all in its path, and intransigence about what might have been without the water will make it different.
We must fix in our minds what we hope to make the world look like after the wave. We must prepare for the worst, but hope for the best.
Just Real Ruby 
I’ve been reading Autumn Journal by Louis McNiece which describes a very similar feeling at the end of 1938. In fact I’ve been getting back into poetry in general after many years of indifference to it. Almost as if I feel things are urgent and there is only time to say things that matter in their most concentrated form. My son and his girlfriend, who have a long-distance relationship (she works in Berlin), have developed a lovely habit of reading poetry aloud to each other over WhatsApp and occasionally they copy me in – today’s treat was a wonderful poem that Amber had written herself. I think that’s the sort of thing that will be keeping us going – learnt by heart and recited around the fire if all else fails.
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Poetry is works of hope and heart. Truly love this Ruth – thank you 💕
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