Leave this creation. God,
this work is masterless. Noah keeps the families, and they keep him. Without them, Noah calls the animal drama as night and the flood as soil. Calls the wives and the sons to the table, calls the pair as scripture and species. Calls the dead as tithe, and the tithed as forgotten. The waves pray with the skeletons of Noah’s semantics. After another extinction, Noah leaves the table, full, and, in the night, under the sky and buffeted by the rolling waves and gust, forgets the names of all he has eaten and tosses their bones to the sea. Every night they must eat.
The first night and the first morning went like this:
Noah prays,
and
eats
and prays again
then sleeps, hands pressed together,
and in the morning there is a church
cloistered between his palms
and it greets the emperor sun
as it churns the new soil of the world.
– Teja Dusanapudi
