Transhumance, Plague Year
Sarah Day
Transhumance
Plague Year
It happened more quickly
than anyone might have expected,
we were unsure whether
we were shifting from mountain
to plain or low ground to high.
There were false starts,
many reluctant to leave
the familiar old terrain.
Then suddenly we were all
on the move in both hemispheres
and in every continent,
bar the coldest. Goodbye
to road, office, city and sky;
we circled and ox-bowed
like cattle or deer or sheep,
clockwise and anticlockwise,
wondering who among us
knew the way. The air smelt
different, birds and all winged
things were the first to notice.
Rats, snakes and centipedes
felt the hush that seismic instruments
recorded. In the absence
of the cities’ noise
we learned to hear the rumblings
of the most distant volcano,
the gentlest earthquake.
The planet it seemed
possessed an interior life
which might always
have been there. Out of the chaos
the dimmest rhythm
could be sensed –
or was it direction that emerged
in the pricks of light –
the earth’s magnetic field
like a map, as we follow one another
out of the old into the new.