A Last Globular Gasp

(From the priestess Enheduanna)

Lioness Inanna

Crouched in a reed thicket

Leaps to slash the fearless

With a stretch of her defaming hand

She crushes the mountain to garbage

Scattering the trash from dawn to dark

With mighty stones she pelts

And the mountain

Like a clay pot

Crumbles

With her might

She melts the mountain

Into a vat of sheepfat

She is Inanna

Bearer of Happiness

Whose strapping command

Hip-dagger in hand

Spreads radiance over the land 

Pour some more champagne and

Rage—Goddess, sing the rage of Homers backing into shrubs

Come gather all around and hear the tale. I sing the song.

Your mothers, your fathers, yours each and every one all,

The budding from seeds to towering trees raising deep forests,

To roiling seas that toss our leaves brittle all along far shores,

Snow glittered peaks frigid still under the wings of high seabirds,

They even sing along with misty but heavy haunts, howls, bellows.

The songbirds sing its long refrain from sunrise to coming darkness

In little sweet voices that hold that same bright circle aloft.

I sing the song. Sing along if you are daring enough.

I had gone down to the sea,

In a boat 120 cubits long and forty cubits broad,

Manned by the choicest sailors of my land

They set their sails, they looked to the sky

They looked at their home, they looked to the sea

If they harbored fear they showed it not

They were brave as lions 

Even as they shipwrecked

Yes

The western capital is ruined and in chaos,

Jackals and wolves stalk amidst disaster.

I sling my sack and take to roads

To sing a song in another tongue

Beyond the walls who knows what be

But hug me kinsman and I shall go see

Where the skies caress the earth

I’ll pass over the sea of bones 

Traverse the deserts, and the plains

The white tips of those distant peaks 

Perhaps the mandate of heaven reach not so far

There we’ll turn it back and look

And understand the poet of seven o’clock sorrows

But for only a moment

Our sighs will become the wind.

.

Only when we’re lost

Do we look to frozen skies

And absent fathers

.

The gods are not what we believe

They thrive at bloody tips of swords

The sun it warms the struggling leaves

The gods are not what we believe

But always leave us more to grieve

Have mercy all you mighty lords

The gods are not what we believe

They thrive at bloody tips of swords

We chop the trees and shank the planks to straight,

Bound with leather, sealed of sap, deck to keel.

A mast of elder trunk to catch the winds inflate,

Billow sails and blow us to trade, to steal

Some silver from the south for silk in bays. 

Salcedo’s slaughter on a junk for more tea,

And seeds and beans, tomatoes, peppers, maize

Left their homes like sailors windswept to sea.

Two bowls of water, clear and clean at gaze,

Leap to drops of blood apiece. Momentarily

Holding the red stormy cloud before—pink.

The planks, they won’t hold fast. The sails won’t raise.

Water is becoming red as fall trees.

Two bowls of blood dripping, dripping, and sink.

.

A finch hops on leaves

Strewn amongst the forest floor

Unfamiliar leaves

.

It is to new and rugged lands

I’d set upon a ship

My home was seized by uncalloused hands

And I escaped their grip

To place some roots in arable earth

Not been left to fallow

I dream of not a single path

The whisper of an empty meadow

Instead came I across the plank

Into the same old messes 

All the world seems cluttered up

With never ending excesses

But still I found some meagre place

Within the concrete cracks

Made my work beneath the sun

Or shadows of the stacks

Then toiled and fought most every day

Weathered by the whether 

To make my way unto my dreams

Or continue altogether

And in the shadow of a storm

The flash scenes of the lightning

I sheltered softly with my love

So lovely and so frightening

So when the skies began to clear

We looked out to the west

The setting sun set fire to

Dream meadows of my quest

I noticed I had taken root

In a maze of paths no less

Your dreams should never be alone

In fields of emptiness

On and on and on we go! A marching and a singing

Trudging down dusty roads, beneath the tall chestnuts

Foot and hoof a stomp and clomp the marching ever goes

We rest at times, under the shade of a grave  

And read the placard nailed to a trunk

Here lies one from the time of acquisition, appearance, and glee

We make our way from brick piles, from the clutter and the smoke

Through winding rocky passes and past never ending parades

Of men with glinting bayonets, off like locusts on the fields

On and on and on we go! Like birds, like weeds, like sweet making bees

Buzzing the perfection of our queen

We’ve found the grasses, found the flowers

We’ve found the others, found their pollen

We’ve found the flightpaths, we’ve sent the scouts

We’ve weaponized our stripes, We’ve dropped ‘em on ‘em

We’ll make the honeycomb, we make the honey

The whole world a honeycomb, we make the honey

All else be damned

We make the money

We make the honey

Who turns such to sweetness? Who turns such to mead?

Who intoxicates and finally steals the me!?

Inanna! What rules we defy and over whose roads we step in step

To tunes played on her instruments

Inanna! Who comes down on us with love, with joy, with desire, with hope, with side eyes, with whispers, with sugary tones, with hands in shadows, with prestidigitation

Inanna! Who smites those with justice, with her dagger, with her wit, with an unalterable vision, with the desperate destitute, bedraggled and begging, with large banners

Inanna! Who rallied the worthy, who in love and without sent them to the roads with bayonets,

With mighty purpose of the heavens, with might of the universe

Inanna! Who set the borders, and then set them ablaze, who made the walls then tore them down, sent the children to shed their souls in mud and blood

Inanna! What a cloak on the long dark road and what we jump to out of deep disturbed dreams 

Inanna! Who blew them like ash in all directions from Shima hospital, them picked at by birds on strange shores, 

And my grandmother brought me into a room away from the others

She held up a bit of scalloped plastic with a green border

Inside I saw a heart aflame pierced by a dagger

Bracketed by the ever so ominous egg of words,

‘Immaculate heart of Mary pray for us now

And at the hour of our death,’

It dripped blood

Your grandfather carried this with him through Saipan

He had it with him on the black sands of Iwo Jima

He pinched it and prayed as the world tumbled

It was this, she said, had kept him alive

As long as he had it in his wallet

He was safe and now

I give it to you

May it keep you safe as well

That’s a lot to ask of a green scapular

But it’s in my wallet now

They thrive at bloody tips of swords

But always manage to deceive

Stepping down deflated streets

The only souls scraping by

Masked like victims of a superhero

with marble eyes rolling over whispers

Nobody talks too loud anymore

Just being near a crime

But shuffle shyly with shoulders closed

Hiding the cracked earth of their hands

And within we work on happy lots

Our voices sing down stairs

We squeeze our frames like accordions

Study reverberations in our lips

We spin time just like a top

Cuckoo clocking the hours 

Poking out on a pendulum 

Puffs of air to the pipes to the bellows

Two tones ring out in time

At the sevens they howl like wolves

How

Yes, the western capital is ruined and in chaos

I meet those jackals in the streets

They hold their toy guns

Their plastic swords

That drip

They wrap themselves in flags

Mirrors facing each other

Same as it ever was

Children can be so very cruel

I heard once that domesticated

Dogs 

Are 

Perpetual 

Puppies

They never grow

Out of that stage

But what should they

Do otherwise but become

Wolves

How

Yes

This time I will remain

Buried with the west

Let grasses grow along that road

I will not take a step

Your trodden paths are lined with briars 

Laid low along the way

Plant a foot and bare a fang

And pour some more champagne