Noah

Poem by Roger Iredale

It is a time for bitumen. A chill wind scours
the flanks of Ararat, the rain is needles
on our skins, injecting pins of bitter steel.
Bitumen comes sluglike, black, oozy; seals
the keel with bonds of tightness holding
hope below the storm.

Refugees arrive in thousands from where
they knew better times than these.
We bend and saw timbers rummaged
out of broken forests where the river cut
such deep ravines. Time is short. We
labour on the hull.

We turn the hull, its scooped and fragrant
shape in pine amazing us. It is a beauty
seen in dark times as if through glass, moulded
and reflective, a message of our hope and fear.
We herd all we can of humans, creatures,
dogs, rats, cockchafers, worms.

The dull seas gush. We rise, an elevator
into storms of wind and fire. We break through
seething clouds, scrape hilltops till the world
is underneath us all.  Today we ride the ocean,
trusting bitumen and the genius of humankind
to save the day.

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