Elizabeth Knapp: “After the Flood”
AFTER THE FLOOD
Something had changed in those who had
witnessed it, so that when they opened
their front doors, squinting into the light,
what had once been a concrete sprawl
appeared to them as the oceans of heaven,
crests glinting in the late afternoon sun,
as the hum of motorboats ruptured
the silence, goldbeaters on the water’s skin.
No one remembered the days leading up
to it—how the birds grew strangely quiet,
how the horses crossed the sudden fields
as if spooked by their own shadow, how
everyone went on about their business
behind the wheel in the kingdom of God.
Elizabeth Knapp is the author of The Spite House (C&R Press, 2011), winner of the 2010 De Novo Poetry Prize. Her work has recently appeared or is forthcoming in 32 Poems, Beloit Poetry Journal, Kenyon Review, Quarterly West, and River Styx, among others. She teaches at Hood College in Frederick, Maryland.