The Ark

What’s art to the soul, bees’re to flowers; a wasteland without either?

I’m pushed far off into the river, because the government wants to uproot this slum and develop the land. Land is scarce, and I have been driven out with the rest of slum-dwellers, not once or twice but many, driven out mercilessly, our shacks bulldozed, our spirits broken. But we rise again in a phoenix existence, governments cannot rid of us. 

The sun rises even as we speak, I see lights filtered through the bees of the lush forest around the deep seas where the river and the sea meet, where I make an ark and I sleep in it another type of dwelling made in the seas. An expert in ark-making which I’ve become now from building a long ark, way too long for all the slum dwellers to live. This skill is a lifesaver, I make, mend broken arks and paint over its solid wood, until this becomes an art. Every time a hut on land is bulldozed, tall towers, constructed in its place, I appear before the demolished shacks to take advantage, and elsewhere into the seas until the ark glows at night like a spec on dark sea waves.

Ark dwellers pay me well. I can now build a brick house with it on an isolated island; papers, leases—documents, works for all that’s worth. Even join the builders’ group with such quality skills I’ve learn’t from ark building. They will gladly hire me and I can eventually buy them off. Great transformations lay on the horizon, as I start to lay bricks for a building of development project of a newly vacated slum. Then one day, a few men from the ark come along putting a claim to the land, because this is where their lost shacks were. They are no seafarers.

I look at them, I hide my face for I know these people whom I built strong new arks, my soulful arts on the sea. In my growing distance from the hive, those live off the sea. Oh! Look, look at me! What I have become!  My place isn’t on board the ark is an art I chose, which I choose to opt out. I’m a beyond rich, a brick layer by trade who owns a flat on this island—a wasteland of monstrosity called development, ultimately altruistic, a symbiotic symbolism where bees and beaus disconnect.