A great, dark flood comes pouring through the cracks
of the dam I have been so carefully building
since my younger days, when wisemen advised me
to guard against the all-encompassing darkness.
Truly, I believed them, built the dam,
thinking, hoping, praying it was tough
enough to hold the murkiness at bay . . .
Murkiness? No! Not even black!
But somehow darker than evil imaginings,
so dense that my dam, built only by my hands,
is creaking, cracking, laughing at my folly,
my stupidity in thinking I could make it stand
against the dark flood pouring through its cracks.
Then to my memory a point comes leaping,
a theme somehow forgotten, even by me,
a key in all the words the wisemen said:
“Mortals can build their dams, and helpful
they will be in keeping those same mortals
free of the stain to which the undammed
river damns all mortals, if their dams
are not enough a dam to keep the flood
from pouring through cracks and drowning.
“That flood, that dark flood that comes pouring
through the cracks and filling up your shoes,
will rise inside your pool behind the dam
when you meant to keep a pool on the other side.
Do you think you'll make a pool and only look,
observing, thanking God the dark slime stayed
on the other side of your dam, mortal-built?
Do you think you'll see the bodies drowned
in the dark water, bloated bodies white in contrast?
Do you think you will say, ‘Well, if they had built
their dams as strong as mine they would not
float here for me to see but not see me’?
Their dams they, some of them, will have made
as strong, if not stronger, than yours will stand!
“You need a hope to weave throughout those bricks,
immortal hope, much stronger than mortal men,
much stronger than the darkness coming fast!”—
the dark now coming, pouring through my cracks.
Ethan McGuire is a writer and computer scientist whose essays, poems, short stories, and translations have appeared in Blue Unicorn, The Dispatch, Emerald Coast Review, New Verse News, VoegelinView, and other publications. He is an editor at Tar River Poetry, Literary Matters, and New Verse Review and the author of Songs for Christmas (Harmonia Mundi) and Apocalypse Dance (Wipf & Stock). Ethan lives with his wife and children in Fort Wayne, Indiana.
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