The Reservoir Overflowed

The Reservoir Overflowed

(“He knelt down and cried out in a loud voice, ‘Lord! Do not remember this sin against them!” He said this and died.’” Acts 7:60)

The reservoir overflowed its banks today,
tide pools waited their unveiling.
The moon had pulled all the water to one side,
the thunder clapped while the monsoon sang.
I had rehearsed my speech for weeks.
The podium was set like a stele on the sand.
The microphones and speakers were fine-tuned,
the crowd was invited,
the fliers distributed making sense of it all.

When at once the water wicked from my socks
to the hems of the denim I wore.

I say
at once
from my pinpoint inaccuracy.

As the landscape melted, the river felt its power
spreading and filling each depression.
Definitions faded as the waters rose.
I suppose I could say this uprightly,
but I’d rather leave it oblique for the
generations to come.

The crowd arrived too late to see me fade
beneath the waves,
but they shouted, “You should not have stayed.”
They held on to their stories, though
in the telling,
they abused the patterns that only watching can
see.

Me? I felt I knew, now,
every song by heart that
I had never heard before. And though
buried and swept downstream,
dying was what redeemed everything I
thought was worth living for.

Live on and sing, oh forgiven ones.