adam and noah and goose

when a japanese print shows many different animals, half of them become surreal, as we see in this image entitled 'the magician's party."

when we in the west, however, show multiple animals, we are much more realistic, showing real situations: the garden of eden, noah's ark, and mother goose.

SECOND ADAM

Whatsoever Adam called every living creature, that was the name thereof.
—Genesis

When the Deluge had passed,
into my head, by twos, came the creeping things,
the horn of their jawbones shining, and the things of the air,
wing-cases breaking like clasp knives, asking their names.

Storm-light colored their passing
with an animal imminence.
They wheeled
on the pile of their plumage, in the dread of their animal being,
and rode in the ark of my head

where the possible
worked like a sea.
Nothing was given me there. Nothing was known.
Feather and scale,
concussions of muscle and fur,
the whale
and the name for the whale
rose on the void
like a waterspout,
being, and ceasing to be:

till keel clashed and I spoke: mayfly,
wood-weasel, stingray, cormorant, mole—
choosing the syllables,
holding a leaf to the torrent,
unharmed and infallible, while Creation descended, in twos.

Ben Belitt

Ben Belitt, “Second Adam” from The Enemy Joy (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1964). Source: Poetry (January 1964).

ribbit

THERE WILL COME SOFT RAINS

(War Time)

There will come soft rains and the smell of the ground,
And swallows circling with their shimmering sound;

And frogs in the pools singing at night,
And wild plum-trees in tremulous white; Robins will wear their feathery fire
Whistling their whims on a low fence-wire;

And not one will know of the war, not one
Will care at last when it is done.Not one would mind, neither bird nor tree
If mankind perished utterly;

And Spring herself, when she woke at dawn,
Would scarcely know that we were gone.Sara Teasdale

Online text © 1998-2007 Poetry X. All rights reserved.
From Flame and Shadow | Macmillian, 1920