Before the Fog Lifted

Julie Mellor

 

Trees, fresh in bud, lost their leaves,

lichen grew overnight on walls where it would normally
take a hundred years to root. Elderberries blistered,
rosehips blackened, though there was no frost.

 

Then it rained, and the house that had stood

since the seventeenth century found its roof sagging.
Glass loosened in its small windows,

loosened and cracked.

 

The river swelled until it skimmed the footbridge

at Thurlstone, carried fertilizer bags, polystyrene packaging,
a fall pipe like a huge stick of liquorice

down the Don valley and into the city

 

where ochre water spewed over roads, rose up
through drains that could no longer cope,

surged into cellars, front rooms, lifted translations
off bookshelves, swilled them clean of words.

 

---

Before the Fog Lifted won third prize in the Lupus UK Poetry Competition 2012.

 

Julie Mellor lives in Penistone. She read English at Huddersfield University and has a PhD from Sheffield Hallam. Her poems have appeared in magazines and anthologies including Brittle Star, Mslexia, The Rialto and Smiths Knoll. Her pamphlet Breathing Through Our Bones was a winner in the 2011/12 Poetry Business Book & Pamphlet Competition, chosen by Carol Ann Duffy.