ReCreation :: The Flood

ReCreation

words=>reality | thought=>action | ideas=>life

The Flood

Sep 15, 2007

tagged as: Poetry

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 “me, me, me”

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 there’s 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

» updated by Jonathan Lipps on September 15, 2007, at 2:15 am

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Jonathan Lipps:

September 15, 2007, 2:46 am

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?

Jonathan Lipps:

September 15, 2007, 12:01 pm

Yeah, exactly, Tbone. I think I was also coming from a place of thinking about the way to effect change in the world, and how my tendency is to try to speak louder, write more, and try harder to get more people to hear what I have to say that I think is valuable. And since everyone else is doing more or less the same thing--trying to uphold and propagate their own identities--the picture that came to mind was a great cacophony of people shouting directions and ideas to the world. But it's being meaningless because no one's listening anyway.

So to counter that was the image of this small and quiet place that looks like it wouldn't have any great effect on the louder streams, and maybe it doesn't. But within that quietness our efforts are seen for what they really are--arrogant self-declarations--and we're able to drop them and reconnect with the memory of something deep and slow, rather than shallow and swift.

I guess I'm just playing with the idea that the way to really change the world might not be to speak, but to listen.