A Window Shalt Thou Make to the Ark – a poem by Kelli Logan Rush

A Window Shalt Thou Make to the Ark
(From Genesis 6:16)

First days, and out our one window, water whipped, 
the twisting brawn of sycamore scrawls its gray-white grief 
across the red alluvium of sky; the sky turns gully, 
gravid green, pounding into blear spires of black:  
pines stripped bare, tired verticals we have to trust 
but know not if they’ll snap and smash us. Or, 
if we’ll smash them, or — for this one hour, at least — 
we’ll be hurled unharmed beyond. Housed hollow, 
how we pitch and roll, crash and groan. And lumber on. 
No — we bob. We’re meager, mini; the horned ones, 
snorting ones — even they go flying tiny with us 
through a sea that’s all around, within, on top of, one with 
this brilliant covenantal square of writhing sky.

Kelli Logan Rush lives in her native city of Winston-Salem, N.C., where she worked in the corporate world as a writer and web manager for the tobacco industry. Her poems have appeared in the Southern Poetry Review, Plainsongs, The Orchards Poetry Journal, The Delta Review and Third Street Writers, among others. Her interests include local music, home and garden, atomic-era style and U.S. East Coast travel. She has an MA in European history.