Posted by babylon crashing | Filed under Illustration and art
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sappho and the great god pan invent the sonnet
10 Wednesday Sep 2014
grace’s skin
10 Wednesday Sep 2014
Tags
First Lover, First Mother, grace's skin, Lilith, outcast, poem, Poetry, sonnet
“In this first testing ground of the atomic bomb I have seen the most terrible and frightening desolation in four years of war. It makes a blitzed Pacific island seem like an Eden. The damage is far greater than photographs can show.”
–Wilfred Burchett
6th PRAYER:
Coming home in Lilith’s arms must I mount
the sand storm and shamble on toward ancient
Djenne-Djenno; together our names count
very little. What you call pussy, cunt,
bitch, I call mother, niece, aunt. I won’t be
the one who burns your vile house down. You’ll do
that; you’ll raise your own hand, for my story
is of a goddess who said no and who
met a priest wearing authority, cast
out First Wife, First Lover. If you must know
me then enter me like proverbs, grace’s
skin. All those words of yours, like a bomb blast,
simply damns you. Call me a Skank. Tease. Ho.
I am proud to be the child of Bitches.
one great truth
10 Wednesday Sep 2014
Tags
Djenne-Djenno, Lilith, Mother of a Mixed Multitude, poem, Poetry, sonnet, there is no one great truth
“The vastness of the desert frightened her. Everything looked too far away, even the cloudless sky. There was nowhere you could hide in such emptiness.” — James Carlos Blake
2nd PRAYER:
To talk of Her is to talk of Eden,
a new religion barely two thousand
years old. The girl chased footprints while the sun
made tracks in the caravan path glisten
leading to one more heat mirage and what
do they make of that in Djenne-Djenno
voices on the wind where no one sleeps but
the girl herself and what did the pharaoh
know of the wide divine that you yourself
did not save that there is no one great truth
that all paths lead to a dried up water
hole. When I count bleached bones I count myself.
You pray to an old man, I pray to youth,
to a girl, I pray to the First Lover.
breaking down babylon’s door
10 Wednesday Sep 2014
“Once, my mother told a whole host of angels that she’d rather die than go back to a man she didn’t love.” ― Brenna Yovanoff
5th PRAYER:
I is I, Lilith is Lilith. Mama
who came out of Babylon will save us.
Call it Djenne-Djenno. Call it Jeddah.
City of Souls. Mankind is still lawless,
despite Allah, Christ and Yahweh. Your laws
are what you ignore. Why not, then, condemn
such men? Eye for eye? Aiii, I won’t, because
war, rape and killing, that’s your gifts, they stem
from gods acting like men. If I follow
let me follow your mothers and your young.
I will march to your city’s gates, pound on
your doors, demand entrance. I do not know
what will happen next. Perhaps I’ll speak in tongue,
perhaps I will rise like the sun at dawn.
][
note:
Jeddah and Djenne-Djenno are ancient cities, respectfully. Djenne-Djenno is considered to be among the oldest in sub-Saharan Africa, while Jeddah is located in western Saudi Arabia along the Red Sea coast. The ruins of Babylon are located in modern-day Iraq.
mother monster sire lady
10 Wednesday Sep 2014
“Madness plants mirrors in the desert. I find their meaning frightening.” ― Floriano Martins
4th PRAYER:
What could catch Lilith? A djinn’s brass bottle?
A song? A prayer? No one could catch Isis,
and she was twice as old. A human skull
is not constructed to house a goddess;
She is vast, like a sand storm, like a djinn.
Mother monster, sire, lady. I am Thirst.
I am Hunger. There isn’t enough sin
here to feed a soul. Sin, like a sun-burst,
is far beyond human control. Make me
arch. Make me dreadful. I’m nothing but loss.
But I believe. Hunger. Thirst. These answers
will not save my soul. I am vain and She
who I’ve caught in a bottle, like a cross,
like a book, will always hate her captors.
summoning
10 Wednesday Sep 2014
Tags
Babylon, Bedouin, free verse, Jeddah, Lilith, poem, Poetry, sand storm, summoning
“I have always loved the desert. One sits down on a desert sand dune, sees nothing, hears nothing. Yet through the silence something throbs and gleams …” ― Antoine de Saint-Exupery, The Little Prince.
1st PRAYER:
Wake and watch dawn pour over the desert;
as it does everyday in the city
of Jeddah, in Babylon. She searched for
Lilith among the corpses the raiders
leave for the vultures for she has waited
lifetimes, another dawn, one more sunset,
for this. Out on the Sahara’s low lip
something entered her wrists, thin fingers stirred,
touching, just once, nails kissing each other.
All I tell you is a secret, a need
beyond word, beyond sound, silence, until
the silence releases something like prayer,
like song. She sat in the sand, drew circles
with her curved horn-blade. It is hard not to fall
in love with blades, with rage, with a war like blades.
It was a summoning from the silence,
from Lilith, the First Wife, the First Lover.
She threw down the curved-horn, turned to the south.
A Bedouin widow sat on a dune,
watching the girl watching the vast sand storm
approach, washing over everything; pulsing
with what the ancients called destruction of life.
by moon and crossroad
10 Wednesday Sep 2014
3rd PRAYER:
Mother of a mixed multitude, seeking
Lilith but not her flesh nor the image
of her flesh not the bone nor the clicking
of tongue not the brain wearing its damage
as mask not the mind with its false color
and not this and not that I have followed
the dim tracks of the Bedouin mother
following the girl by moon and crossroad
following the sand storm. I love rough seas.
I love their power. I’m not smart enough
to get out of their way. I want the myth
of the desert to fall in love with me.
Consume me. I call upon the mischief,
the sand, all that they call Mother Lilith.
underground
10 Wednesday Sep 2014
Living on a hill, rain water would run
down, she’d follow its path to the gutter,
moon moths playing in her hair, a vixen
at her heels, to watch it vanish under
the street. Underground water works this way.
In the desert it has no other choice.
As a child she was taught fencing, gunplay,
and wit, verbal repartee. When the voice
from the chip implanted in her skull spoke
she would obey. The fox was always nice,
the moths didn’t scare her. She liked watching
the rain fall in the street, letting it soak
into her, making the rain smell like spice
and the underground vast and bellowing.
anyanwu
10 Wednesday Sep 2014
Posted by babylon crashing | Filed under Illustration and art
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sulfur and breath
07 Sunday Sep 2014
Rising up from my bath snorted the ghost
of a bull, all ruined from some bastard
picadore’s lance. From where I sat, almost
all of his soft, looping intestines swirled
in the water, and the sulfur and breath
from his nostrils hissed. He had gored the man
who had slain him during the “third of death,”
“tercio de muerte,” fight. What began
as a haunting ended with me sewing
the bull’s head upon the matador’s vast
corpse. But being a vain ghost, I also
sewed his cojones, leaving them hanging
below his knees. The rest of the day passed
with us snogging mad in the back meadow.
][
note:
I’m using terms here taken from the lexicon of the Spanish blood sport called bull-fighting. A picador is one of the horsemen that jabs the bull with a lance. Tercio de muerte is the third part of a bull-fight where the matador finally plunges his sword into the weakened bull. Cojones are, of course, testicles.
