The Great Inundation by Jonathan Taylor

After a vision of Fr. Balthassar Mas, 1630

 

I dreamed of a great inundation, everything swallowed

by a wave moving up the Thames like a leviathan

until only England’s highest turrets and steeples

reached above the flood. The best were saved,

lords and ladies on their battlements, clergymen

clinging to spires, hems of cassocks pulled away

from the drowning and the drowned.

 

Finally God sent a rainbow as the waters receded

a little. Those left were relieved and arranged

causeways of the heaped-up dead to France

or were rescued by strange flying contraptions

which swooped down like angels and took them

to the fertile lands round the Nile and Red Sea

where they were greeted by many thousands

and went on to found new and better Englands.