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21 Oct 2025
Kerry
Trautman
New
Moon
When He Comes
Back to You
After Claude Debussy’s
The Sunken Cathedral
When the sea rises
all we can do is step backward
as far as we need to
but it’s coming
the water we watched recede
leaving flattened wet sand
that reveals retained sea-water
in halos around footfalls
now returns to reclaim
the land it soaked
move anything you wish dry
to higher ground
Behind the poem...
In 1910, Claude Debussy composed The Sunken Cathedral to evoke the legend of the mythical, long-lost French city of Ys, which is said to have sunk beneath the waves off the coast of Brittany. My poem takes the music’s tidal shifts, its oceanic rise and fall, as its inspiration. These made me think of a relationship between two people – first ending, then trying to restart.
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