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
2 replies on “The Flood”
I just noticed that, totally unintentionally, this poem has 40 lines (plus one for the conclusion). Wow.
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?