The world is a flood, a roaring flood
Of different voices and experiences
Each a call, a clamor for justification
Each drowning out all else
The song is shrill, fingers in ears
Eyes closed, mouth working
Streams that shatter instead of flow
(Just one sperm gets the egg)
Cast in the torrent we sink or swim
And in both the drift inexorable
Downward in the great dissipation
A waterfall of pure selfish Shout
By some chance an eddy forms
A silence outside the current
A strange vacuum we find, and
Hear ourselves for the first time
My great contribution to the world
My voice in its endless streams
Now in the beautiful stillness
Is heard as a strident âme, me, meâ
In the clatter my voice was my own
As a puppet may be unique in all respects,
But still moved by the same strings:
Essence of chains though seeming free
In these backwaters thereâs no need
To scream ourselves deaf in isolation
But listening together, a voice ex nihilo invades
Low frequency song from eternity past
The song was there in the flood
A hum of bass or treble dance of stars
But in the quiet heard for what it is
The tale of a different Stream altogether
Then a snake of a current grabs ahold
The quiet corner is no more
We disappear back into the noise
The striving to tell right from wrong
And we forget the sound of the voice
That alien song of still, deep pools
But we remember the memory,
And hope that by its magic
We might spin free from the flood once more
Jonathan Lipps
I just noticed that, totally unintentionally, this poem has 40 lines (plus one for the conclusion). Wow.Michael ONeil
Took me a few times reading it, but I think I follow. Is a central theme the idea that we often enter into these messy, messed up things about our environments - thinking we are not valuable unless we speak or do something loudly enough to be applauded, and subsequently becoming untrue to ourselves and losing our identity in the process - without realizing that we are offered a choice otherwise, that we are valued even when we are still, and that in fact that we and the world were designed for something much more like the still than like the flood?