Creation Continued

by Wendi White

…and on the 8th day,
after Adam and Eve failed
that totally rigged test,
the people got busy
arguing.
Should they herd the ones with hooves
or begin to plant seeds?
Should they fill their stores with grain
or share it with strangers?
And what about the dates in the oasis?
Who owns those,
not to mention the water?

A few millennia later,
the shape of our choices
began to come clear
as wildfires wiped suburbia
from Napa Valley hills.
Seas rose and ice shelves calved.
Humpbacks pushed North
in search of cooler seas.
And all those marvels we devised—
dams, bridges, canals—
began to collapse.

And on the 9th day
in the middle of August,
at the summer season’s height,
the beaches of Waikiki
lay empty. The water parks
spouted and turned without
a single child’s squeal, and only
the white terns darted
above the Monkeypods,
only Monk Seals lolled on sand,
and the only sign of tourists
were names carved
on Banyan trunks–

trees so long lived that even
a knife’s deepest cut
fades with time.

Wendi White is a poet and educator now musing among the geckoes and ginger scented ridges of O`ahu after a recent relocation from the continental US. She earned her MFA from Old Dominion University’s Creative Writing program in Virginia. Most recently her poetry was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. When not at her writing desk, she can be found shooing Giant African Land Snails from her garden.