NAPOWRIMO #24

Read Write Poem NaPoWriMo Prompt #24 - Find a Phrase

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CHASING AFTER WIND

Empty sky and empty sea: some would name it void; God would name it loneliness. God parted the emptiness with a breath, a word spoken, a breath of many names: zephyr, solano, harmattan, nor'easter, cyclone, hurricane, monsoon, and twelve thousand more.

God created a world: a foundation and a firmament of faith and fecundity, peopled and each piece named. Minor breaths, whispers, were breathed forth, were likewise spoken: the seas churned and the skies writhed with the named breaths.

The people disappointed God with brokenness and frailty, willful disobedience and a need to roar guttural sounds at the named things. Their presence increased God's loneliness; their presence was what God thought the void to be. God roared back with wind and wave, God's unhappiness manifest, God's word always a moment behind God's breath, chasing after wind, chasing after wave.

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Then I saw that all toil and all skill in work come from one person’s envy of another. This also is vanity and a chasing after wind. Fools fold their hands and consume their own flesh. Better is a handful with quiet than two handfuls with toil, and a chasing after wind.
—ECCLESIASTES 4:4–6 (NRSV)