After the flood
by Zhenyan Li
After the flood, setting a beautiful new text by Emma Harding, is a piece about separation, loss and grief, and how our experience of these becomes projected onto the natural world. But there's also the sense that the cycle of nature continues regardless of our individual human tragedies and that there is, ultimately, consolation to be found in that. The voices work almost as one, splintering and merging, while the theorbo echoes and comments almost like a third character.
Emma Harding is a writer and BBC radio producer, specialising in drama and poetry. Her poems have been published in various magazines and anthologies, and a stage play, The Thing Itself was produced at Jermyn Street Theatre in 2019. She’s also written radio dramatisations for BBC Radio 4 and previously participated in RAM’s Opera Makers programme. She is currently working on the libretto of a chamber opera, Behind God’s Back, with composer Joseph Howard. Her debut novel, Friedrichstrasse 19, will be published in spring 2022 by John Murray.
'After the flood' by Emma Harding
Black branches
fracture the sky
a single magpie.
The dark river
near spate
you on one bank
I on another.
From the reedbeds
sad flute
of the curlew
silver light
on the marsh.
Your laughter
the ripple flash
of sun on water.
Your face
The shadow
In the flicker of reeds.
I tell my grief
To the heron
Who dips and weaves
How yesterday
We lay hand in hand
In the leaves.
In this life
Without you
Who can tell me
Who I am?
The geese
are flying back
The word
Stuck
In my throat is
stay