A soft rain

After Hebrews 11:7 and Genesis 6:5-22

A soft rain

tasted by dry ground

welcome for the life

it promises and brings

a little harder now

a good rain, solid

quenching the dryness of the land

more rain then

wary eyes glance toward skies

wondering, waiting

its passing

rain unstopping

creeks rising, rivers

shaking off their banks

soon the running

to the fool in the boat

finding doors shut

gangways pulled up

hearing the cacophony

of animal sounds within

clinging to the tops of trees

water still rising

violence answering

violence

the first creaks

as the boat shifts

from its platform

the groaning and cries

the drowning

outside

the calls, the shouts

the cries pleading upon

ears hurting

stop help open please

sodden voice begging

the boat shifts again

breaks loose, floats

as the rain hardens,

skies falling

Photograph by George Hodan via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.

Sam Batterman's "Wayback"

I finished reading Sam Batterman's Wayback, and I've posted the review at Amazon (may take a while before it's visible, though; Amazon publishes reviews anywhere from immediately to 48 hours later). It's a great story about a "what if" -- what if the Biblical account of creation and the flood found in the book of Genesis were true -- and scientists had the means to verify it?

Batterman mixes science, action, history, a little romance -- and serves up one powerful story.

What impressed me the most, though, was his ability to describe settings -- the landscape. I was in that control center where the scientists have congregated. I was seeing the antedeluvian world for the first time, feeling and inhaling the water-saturated atmosphere and shocked, like the characters, at seeing herds of dinosaurs. I was walking the streets of Jersualem right before the Six-Day Way begins in 1967. I was running with the crew down the streets and into the sewer of the ancient city that doesn't know it's doomed. The detail is amazing, representing some exhaustive research. In the case of the antedeluvian world, the descriptions and detail are speculative but no less real.

Batterman, in his first novel, is clearly a master of setting of the scene.