Deluge

There was a flood last year,
and most likely,
there will be one this year,
just as climbers weather frost and snow to Everest’s zenith
while still warm bodies pack the ice beneath them.
Like the Soviets who stood in Stalingrad,
cattle on the line,
a pin piercing their brains one by one,
oblivious to the obviousness from any other perspective,
or perhaps shocked by the inevitability of it all.
Yet, there is beauty in the deluge of man,
to overcome by attrition,
and compensate through time –
to push the borders of sanity and reason
for ideal ends by any means.
Egypt flourished by the Nile,
and then only by the floods…

Andrew Venegas
San Jose
SJSU
poetry