Photo © Unsplash/Tim Marshall
A year
in close(d) quarters
must feel like forever.
What if you saved your life but lost
your mind?
Cinquain: A short, usually unrhymed poem consisting of twenty-two syllables distributed as 2, 4, 6, 8, 2, in five lines.
Photo © Unsplash/Eutah Mizushima
the rain has been falling how long i don't know
the last time i saw land was so long ago
the trees have all drowned and the mountains are gone
the water obscures every trace of the dawn
within me the rivers of doubt overflow
the rain has been falling how long i don't know
alone on this ocean i bobble afloat
i must have been crazy to get in this boat
it would have been better to die with the world
and not have to see what's familiar unfurled
the rain has been falling how long i don't know
i wonder how far down the flood waters go
this sea-weary vessel will anchor at last
but life as i've known it will be in the past
until then i'll wonder what's lurking below
the rain has been falling how long i don't know
Quatern: A sixteen-line French form composed of four quatrains, with a refrain that is in a different place in each quatrain. The first line of stanza one is the second line of stanza two, third line of stanza three, and fourth line of stanza four.
Photo © Unsplash/Tim Marshall
There was no ark
to save God's heart
when grief crashed in like a flood.
when
regret raindrops
became
pain puddles
that joined up into
remorse rivers
that pooled into
lament lakes
that merged into
sorrow seas
and eventually yielded a
deep blue deluge
over our terminal condition
No—
there was no ark
to save God's heart
when grief crashed in like a flood:
the grief of knowing
the ark he would send us
required room
for no more than
eight.
GENESIS 7
Perhaps it’s because I’ve grown up in the age of blockbuster movies, with end-of-the-world flicks such as Independence Day, Armageddon, and The Day After Tomorrow, but I got a little bit of that ominous, impending-doom feeling as I read this chapter again. I guess that’s because the Bible’s account of the Flood sounds like a scene from a movie: "In the six hundredth year of Noah’s life, on the seventeenth day of the second month—on that day, all the springs of the great deep burst forth, and the floodgates of the heavens were opened." (vs 11)
GENESIS 6
So... the infamous story of the flood. This is usually one of the Bible stories that is known by most everyone—even if they've never read a Bible. But I was struck again by the description of how incredibly corrupt all of life on earth had become. Verse 5 of the Message Bible puts it this way: "God saw that human evil was out of control. People thought evil, imagined evil—evil, evil, evil from morning to night."
