Being Lilith’s child the young priest, pervert,

called you Vava, as in the ancient word,

Vavashot: Lust. Lilith, though, was desert

born and fell in love with the sea’s mothered

magic, naming you Tsovinar: She Strides

Upon Waves. Leave that sucka’ with his psalms

and scant faith, cousin. We’ve both heard the tide’s

long call. We’ve both felt that pull. Nothing calms

me the way She and tempests do. We’ve shed

all our cotton constraints at the shoreline.

Man-made gods have no sway out here. We’ve tread

upon billows and called the brine, “all mine.”

Leave dry land to priests who think that they know

something. They mistake lust for undertow.

][][

Notes:

In the pre-Christian Armenian pantheon, Tsovinar (Ծովինար) is the goddess of water and forces the rain to fall with her rage. Lilith (Լիլիթ) gets associated with whatever fears and phobias men have about sex at the time; thus she is described as being everything from night-haunt succubus to feminist bisexual to free-spirit divorcee. This, of course, says nothing about Lilith herself, who came from the deserts of what is now modern day Syria to the shores of the Black Sea. In one ancient translation it says, “Լիլիթը հայտնաբերեց ծովը/ Lilith discovered the sea.” It says nothing of her sexual appetites, her loathing of Abrahamic religions or even her being the, “Mother of the Unholy Folk … a Mixed Multitude,” that she’s suppose to have given birth to up in the mountains. All that is racist and sexist modern fantasy. The only thing I feel comfortable in repeating is, “Լիլիթը հայտնաբերեց ծովը/ Lilith discovered the sea.”