In the Absence of Saints

The town still stands.
Its streets braided somewhere between cement
and a tide that never leaves.
Though their lips are smiles too long for their faces,
stagnant water rots at their doorstep beneath their feet.

The fog is coiled around the eaves and wraps around their rooftops in a silence too loud to ignore.
But they do, all the same.
The church bell tolls,
though there are no longer any hands to pull its rope.

Silent children splash in flooded alleys.
Fisherman cast nets into waters
where nothing has stirred for in years.
No gulls cry above the shore,
no waves break against the rocks.
The Sea does not crash here, it lies, still as glass,
its depths a mirror for secrets too deep to reflect.

No one speaks of the shadows beneath the waters,
the shapes and information that ripple just past their sight.
Nor the whispers that drift through the mist,
like echoes of lives that should have ended long ago.

Despite the decay and their compulsive rot,
the grocer still sweeps water from his steps,
with a broom full of sodden reeds.
A woman hangs damp linens in air that will never let them dry.

Does no one seem to notice the tide?
Rising inch by inch, flooding their home,
drowning their psyches.
Their town is sinking.
Its hunger is endless.
Its patience is timeless.
I don’t know if it has to wait much longer either.
When it does take them,
will we even know that we’re gone?