Why my poem has the same title as a hundred-year-old blues song

Today, one of my poems was published in the online edition of Amsterdam Quarterly. It has also been selected for the annual print anthology, set for publication in December 2026. This marks the magazine’s 45th edition. The theme “climate overshoot” was a perfect fit for a little poem I’d had sitting on the shelf for years: “When the Levee Breaks.”

Yes, like the Led Zeppelin song. Although, as every blues lover knows, that’s not the original version. This blues classic was written in 1927 by Memphis Minnie, a singer and guitarist who composed over 200 songs, many of which are part of the collective blues memory.

The song is about a major flooding of the Mississippi in 1927, known as The Great Mississippi Flood. With the extreme weather conditions brought on by the current climate crisis, this song about a natural disaster from a century ago is, unfortunately, once again highly relevant.

When the levee breaks

We couldn’t grasp it. How the walls which
we so carefully constructed,
are not the safe fortresses we have longed for
since the day we were born.

So we recited our prayers
cradled children in trembling arms, trusted.

Only a few of us headed for higher ground.

When the levee broke
no one knew where to go.

© Leen Raats

You can read the online issue of Amsterdam Quarterly for free right here.

“Amsterdam Quarterly received a record-breaking number of submissions for its forty-fifth issue on Climate Overshoot. AQ received work for this issue from contributors living in nine different countries on five continents in five genres: fiction, photoessay, photography, poetry, and reviews. Their work covered climate concerns about extreme weather and temperatures, declining amounts of fresh water, rising sea levels and the resulting shoreline erosion, species extinction, migration, and the generation and the use of solar and wind energy.

Headlining this issue is Richenda Van Leeuwen’s and Bob Ward’s photoessay on solar and wind energy. In addition, in line with Percy Bysshe Shelley’s admonition that ‘poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the earth’, AQ45 received a staggering 85% of all submissions in this genre. Climate overshoot poems were submitted by Nathaniel Calhoun, Andrew Darling, Adam Gianforcaro, Philip Gross, Monique van Maare, Bryan R. Monte, Leen Raats, Angela Segredaki, Sally St Clair, Gopu M. Sunil, Jane Thomas, Michael H. F. Wilkinson, Linden Van Wert, and Mantz Yorke.

There is also a short story by Obiotika Wilfred and photography by Erik Vincenti Zakhia as well as reviews of the late A.S. Williams’s The Palliative Horse by Hollis Kurman and Susan E. Lloy’s Deep Breaths of the Inanimate by Bryan R. Monte.

We hope you find AQ45 cathartic, instructive, and motivating.”