Vanished cities, drowned, razed
desolation and grief done and dusted
Atlantis gone into to myth
Carthage, Mohenjo-daro, Great Zimbabwe
all left ruins to wander and wonder
in history’s depth lie others
lost in deserts, buried in forests, slipped into oceans
more will go as sea levels rise, storms devour
There are other ways to lose a city
I have lost mine, changed and changing
beyond what I once knew
foreign in my home town
I archeologise
observing layers buried by new wealth
(transitory puffs of global capital)
visualise the people that have moved on
as I have
refugees priced out, social-cleansed
living on the fringes
looking back to better times
Copyright © 2022 Kim Whysall-Hammond
The Cheesesellers Wife 
very nice Kim! <3 <3
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Thanks Carol!
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Very thought provoking, Kim
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Thank you Derrick
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A powerful message with lots of wonderful echoes of history, Kim!
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Thank you Ingrid.
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The feels of this is different. Brilliantly penned 🌻
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Thank you, that’s much appreciated 😊
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That’s fantastic. I love the parallels between the lost cities of the past and the way our cities are now places that no longer welcome us.
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I would love to move back to London. What better place to age gracefully — free transport, world beating specialist medical care, theatres, art, everything. But the property prices are crazy.
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An interesting way to view one’s hometown.
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This past week some coastal areas on Vancouver Island and around Vancouver saw storm and rising tides which did considerable damage to infrastructure, and flooded some areas. So your poem really speaks to me. I resonate with the refugees priced out………….BC has a lot of climate refugees thanks to 2021, and the homeless population has increased along with sky high rents and housing costs. Not sustainable.
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Sadly this will be happening more and more
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Around the world wealth concentrates in cities and their suburban belts while rural areas empty, become wastes … yet what concentrates in cities also ruins them, makes them unaffordable and takes so much of their common tone and gentrifies them into “transitory puffs of global capital” (great line). I like the shifting, sifting eye here, accounting for what is lost
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London in particular is being ruined by its popularity with the global rich. Working people are forced out of their locality by insane property prices.
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When sometime lofty towers, I see down razed, and brass eternal slave to mortal rage … (Shakespeare)
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William often has the words!!!
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