The Flood

Primordial chaos coaxed into a pattern
as light and dark become the day and night:
This world is formed of undivided matter,
then separated, spectrumed out of white.
The valleys rise; the mountains take their height;
and time begins to know before and after.

The dry land lifts with ocean as its border—
yet mountains rise in deep abyssal shade.
The soil original maintains its order
except where springs and streams the heights invade
or weaken cliffsides ‘til they shrug, unmade,
and humankind cries out to God its warder.

There is no answer: Word sinks down to silence,
and we who long for life are drowned in death.
The only certainties are rot and violence,
though, diligent, we search the length and breadth
of earth and sea for ways to keep our breath—
in vain between the flood and desert dryness.

And yet the silent Word forever spoken
is echoing in every night and day.
All times may shattered be, all patterns broken:
It lets itself be shaken on the sway
of tempests and of earthquakes in their play.
Creation groans and something new is woken.

Between the cause and the effect is mercy;
between the water and the land is mud.
Divinity into our death is bursting
to share our desert bone and tempest blood,
and God himself is lost beneath the flood
and knows our fear of it, and yet our thirsting.

He swallows death, by death our life increasing;
our time he pierces with eternity
and takes our shattered fragments, mending, piecing.
He gathers us, the dry land, and the sea
all in himself, yet each itself shall be,
and in his endless day go on unceasing.

Separation of Light from Darkness. Sistine Chapel, fresco Michelangelo - Web Gallery of Art[1], Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=1551126