Flooding inundated much of southern Quebec on Sunday, breaking a dam, washing houses downstream and sending thousands of people to emergency shelters. Victims include two children killed in their sleep when a mudslide buried a house in La Baie.
--LA BAIE, Quebec, (AP)story, 7.21.96

And, behold, I, even I, do bring a flood of waters upon the earth, to destroy all flesh, wherein is the breath of life, from under heaven; and every thing that is in the earth shall die.
--Genesis, 6:12,17

The biblical flood story, the deluge, was a late offshoot of a cycle of flood myths known everywhere in the ancient world. Thousands of years before the Bible was written, an ark was built by Sumerian Ziusudra. Among the details that religious orthodoxy took care to suppress was the point that the god who caused the flood was disobedient to the Great Mother, who didn't want her earthly children drowned.
--Barbara Walker, The Woman's Encyclopedia of Myths and Secrets

Don't you know who I am? I am Nakawe, Great-Grandmother Earth, she who makes things grow. I have come to tell you that you have been wasting your time. The people have forgotten the gods, and a great flood is coming. In five days it will begin to rain, and it will not stop raining until your fields wash away and water covers the earth.
--Emery and Durga Bernhard, The Tree That Rains

Torrent Dreams

The 1993 flood at Davenport, Iowa, was estimated as a 100-year event; at Burlington, Iowa, it was a 200-year event; and at Quincy, Illionis, and Louisiana, Mo., the flood was estimated to be a 500-year event.

The flooding on the Mississippi River was the most devastating of any flood in the history of the United States in terms of property damage, disrupted businesses, and personal trauma. Millions of acres of farmland were under water for weeks during the growing season.
--U.S.Army Corps of Engineers, The Great Flood of 1993 Post-Flood Report

I found a torrent falling in a glen
Where the sun's light shone silvered and leaf-split;
The boom, the foam, and the mad flash of it
All made a magic symphony; but when
I thought upon the coming of hard men
To cut those patriarchal trees away,
And turn to gold the silver of that spray,
I shuddered.
--Edwin Robinson, The Torrent

Muse	Dreaming
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