What I was looking for when I happened upon "The mosquito question" was Yes and No, a very long puppet show in verse. I didn't find it, so the best I can do is quote a few passages from memory.
The character No (Noah) is relating the story of the flood, presented as an undoing of the six days of creation. And just as the creation ends with God seeing that all he had created was good, the flood story begins
When God, surveying all he had
Created, saw that it was bad.
There follows a bit of (clever, allzuclever) pun-heavy badinage in which No's interlocutor questions how anything created by God could be bad, and then No gets back to his story.
I'll answer all in time. Now hark!
God spoke, and said, "Let there be dark!"
And dark clouds gathered in the sky
To hide earth's shame from him on high.
"The vault that keeps the seas below
And those above apart must go,"
Said God. The firmament was broken,
The seas set free as God had spoken.
"Let dry land disappear," said God.
"Let not a scrap of stone or sod
Remain above the surface, though
It top a mountain." It was so.
No fruit tree bearing fruit was seen,
Nor herb, for all that once was green
Was overwhelmed beneath the blue.
All living creatures perished too.
The lions, tigers, bears, and horses
All were turned to bloated corses.
The cattle and the creeping things,
The fowl as well, whose worn-out wings
Had not at last the strength to keep
Them safe above the rising deep --
In short, all things in which was breath
Succumbed to universal death.
And God's own image, which had crowned
His whole creation, also drowned.
Why was I thinking about this? Because Joan of Ark is, as the jokes have it, Noah's wife, and Noah is associated not only with the ark but with the arc (the rainbow, l'arc-en-ciel), and now with the dark (d'Arc) as well.
My post on the dark rainbow connected it with the crow. Noah released a raven from the ark (as noted in my original, pre-birdemic post on corvids). And when they made a Noah movie back in 2014, the titular patriarch was played by -- who else?
2 comments:
I like the parallelism in the poem between the six days of Creation and the flood. Never noticed that before.
My dear Wm - You can (or could) really do it! - I mean the difficult art of light verse; which is not all that common a gift (tho' my brother can do it too).
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