Kristallnacht remembered

Tonight is the night in 1938 when the German high command convinced itself that it could do anything to Jews and other minorities in its midst, and the world would do nothing to stop it. Tonight is the anniversary of Kristallnacht, the euphemism for the state-sponsored pogrom against German and Austrian Jews on Nov. 9 and 10 of 1938.

On Nov. 9, 2001 I led a city-wide commemoration of Kristallnacht in Victoria, BC, Canada. The following were my opening remarks. Although eight years have passed, my concerns are precisely the same today as they were then.

Tonight is the 63rd anniversary of Kristallnacht. In the past I have tried, in these opening moments, to welcome you, and thank you for understanding why it’s so important to remember Kristallnacht, and the Shoah. In previous years that might have been necessary, since the reality of Kristallnacht seemed so removed from our lives here in Victoria.

But this year, unexpectedly, shockingly, the differences between Kristallnacht and this moment are not so different. Once again we see hatred becoming the dominant ideology of a people. I am forced to conclude that, having failed to see and address the rising tide of hatred in the Muslim world, I/we have failed to truly learn the lessons of Kristallnacht. In 1932 the signs were plain to see and the world ignored them, and good Germans ignored them or made excuses for them. We have done the same, and good Muslims have done the same. And throughout the 30's the free world tried to appease and make concessions to the rising tide of nazism. It made good economic sense, and of course one had to be politically realistic.

And the same is true in this era. We have not wanted to believe the depth and the extent of the envy and hatred that has deeply damaged the Muslim world. We have become used to, and desensitized to the accusations, and curses, and tirades, made by ideologues. We have watched, mute or unconcerned, as the gorgeous melody and poetry of the call to prayer has become a call to hatred and to war. We have somehow come to sympathize with, or at least accept as a valid side to the argument, the claim that the Muslim people are victims, and the problem is Israel.

The problem is not Israel, and the problem is not the United States. The problem is the ideology of envy and hatred that has been carefully nurtured in the Muslim world for most of this century.

And so we looked on the events of Sept. 11, much as the world looked upon Kristallnacht in 1938, wondering, how could this happen. And in that cold November in 1938, the dangerous slope into world war turned icy and inevitable. I do not know if we are on an equally icy slope into world war right now, but if there is still a way to turn back, it must begin now. It must begin by helping moderate Muslims, who love and value democracy and multi-cultural respect, to reassert their primacy in the world-wide Muslim community.

Jews and Christians cannot go into the mosques to redirect the nature and quality of the dialog. We don’t have that authority. Only Muslims can do that. Christians and Jews cannot speak for Islam in the Muslim media. Moderate Muslims must do that. And it is not enough if they simply make their voices heard; they must take control of the debate.

If there is a Muslim in this congregation, hear me. You are not only our last hope; more importantly, you are your own people’s last hope. Germany’s name has been forever besmirched because of it’s ideology of hatred. Don’t let that happen to your faith. In the name of God, defend your honor not with hatred and violence, but through an ideology of peace and mutual respect. And may it be God’s will.

Jerusalem

Remembering Blake’s Jerusalem, and Islam’s Jerusalem, and our Jerusalem of the Zionist dream, I remember my Jerusalem, she to whom I’ve been married these 33 years now, as of 10/30/2009, my wife, my Nancy.

While reading S.Y. Agnon’s Betrothed, I wrote the following on pages 82 and 83 this morning, responding to, “The Consul was very pleased with [Jerusalem]. True, what he had seen with his own eyes was unlike the Jerusalem of legend or the Jerusalem of his imagination.... But since one did not really know where to make a start, or how to proceed in the way of reform, it was best to leave Jerusalem as she was.”

I have loved Jerusalem all the days of my living.
I loved her when I rejected her
And I loved her before I knew her.
She who lay with me in other worlds
She called to me here, and I sought her out.
Oh Jerusalem, your loving fills me.
I who was tossed as the seaweeds on the shore
Have been carried by your tides
To great depths. I who am but a grain of sand,
Now storm-tossed out to sea, there
You and my Maker are merging into One.

Strolling Through Joshua Tree

A Hiker's journal.

3/13/05, 29 Palms Inn, Gold Park cottage

7:30am. The sun has been up for almost two hours; the cool of the night already surrendering. The chords of a light breeze strum a soft accompaniment to the birds. We drive 20 miles or so into the park to the Ryan’s Mountain Trail Head, Cal a little skeptical that the hike would be demanding enough, and thus unworthy of him.

8:00am. We did not find the trail head, but went down the Indian Cave path to a pile of huge boulders. We skirted around them, and cut parallel to the road, freestyling thru the terrain. Quickly, but by chance, we came to the main trail, a well marked and well worn path in a beautiful ascent of random height stone steps. We wondered at the toils of a crew to build such a sculpted trail. It was not long before we were panting, our legs tired at the persistent ascent running diagonally up the mountain. There were 2 mountains, actually. The 2nd was behind and to the right of the first (looking from the trail head origin), and substantially higher. I was glad the trail appeared to ascend only the nearer and lower mountain.

I was carrying a small backpack with 3 bottles of water, 2 oranges, a handful of trail mix, a cell phone (for a clock; no reception in the park), and binocs. Saw a big flying insect that had a brilliant red spot on it; oops, a ruby throated hummer. We saw plenty of lbj’s, ravens, one or 2 hawks with red-tail coloration (but no positive ID), plenty of grey-mottled Side Blotched lizards, a couple of Zebra-tailed lizards (white, long-legged, and speedy) and we were on the lookout for lumbering tarantulas (that’s good), or maybe even a rattler (that’s not so good). Floral sightings: an abundance of little yellow flowers (scale bud?) interspersed with navy blue chias (look like clover buds with spikes) and some yellow desert poppies; an occasional brittlebush (look like daisies); some Canterbury bells, which are brilliant purple trumpet shaped flowers about a half to 2 thirds the size of my little finger, hanging on tall gangly shoots. Subtly but abundantly painting the ground were little light purple blooms, not an inch tall and maybe a half centimeter or a little more in diameter – my best guess is that it was purple mat, but I’m not convinced. Stunning. The cute but viciously unforgiving chollas were scarce, but there were a lot of creosote bushes and other low ground cover, plus a few pinyon pines clinging in the shelter of the rocks, often in seeming defiance of a functional root system.

Our stops became more common and our legs a bit wobbly, and it was clear we weren’t even half way up. Sweating heavily, and breathing heavily, when I stopped I could feel my heart thumping. But the scenery and vistas kept changing, and becoming more spectacular. As we looked closely we could see the hillside was a vast palette of colors working around a basis of deep-gray green and deep gray-blue, with light green tender plants filling in the Cezanne-like color patches, and a thousand highlights of white in the bark and rock, and of course the milky way of star-like yellow flowers, amid the light gray boulder outcrops.

As we became increasingly tired, we wondered if we got this tired on the 6 mile Kauai hike or the climb at Organ Pipe with Rick and Isaac, or the 8-miler back and forth to Lost Palms Oasis in the south of Joshua Tree with Rick, Isaac, and David. We must have, but the memory of it is washed away. Even now, writing this, not 5 hours later, I can’t remember what it felt like, only that we discussed it at length as we made regular stops on the trail.

We passed a few hikers coming down, and they assured us we were closing in on the peak, when suddenly we got to a saddle between the two mountains. The peak of the lower one was at hand, but, woe and despair, the trail turned right, up towards the higher peak. But now, for some reason, perhaps the carbs were kicking in from the snack we had 15 minutes before, but first me, then Cal got 2nd winds, and we began to pick up the pace. Also motivating us, we saw that a couple, maybe in their late 30's or early 40's were catching up to us. That was not acceptable.

The views were stunning. I mentioned that a moment ago but got sidetracked. The vast flat valley, once a seabed; the sharp, jagged rock out crops, both small and large; the mountain ridges, some totally barren and unearthly rugged, others gray green from the exuberance of a wet winter. Then the further ridges fading into the light blue gray, and beyond to the faded blue horizon, with the cerulean blue of the sky quickly turning brilliant, almost crystalline, as your gaze rises towards the zenith. With every turn in the trail the view would change. Now a valley lowland would disappear and only the higher mountain ridges would be visible; now the vista would open up into a vast expanse. We coiled around to the far side of the mountain, to a whole new panorama. And now we began to close in on the summit. The climb leveled off to a modest slope, and the trail went from rock to smooth fine gravel and dusty sand/soil. Cal began to run, pushing himself to the limit, and I walked faster, unable to drive myself to run.

The peak was at about 5400+ feet, and I estimate the vertical climb was 1500-2000 feet, on a 1.5 mile trail. Is that possible? We did it in about one hour or a tad less. The view from the top, as all the climbers we passed assured us, was unparalleled in all 360 degrees. The seabed valley extending south for 20 miles or more, enclosed by layer after layer of upthrusted ridge. We sat on a great pile of rubble rock that marked the summit, eating a bit, drinking, resting, drinking in the view, arrested by it. After about 15 minutes we headed back down, Cal wearing the backpack now. We started out about 3-400 meters behind the couple that had “pushed” us on the way up. We decided we wanted to pass them, but we really didn’t think we could since they were clearly hustling. Nonetheless, in short order, almost running, we caught them, exchanged a few niceties, and powered on, walking pretty much at top speed all the way down, keeping them in our rear view mirror, and stretching our lead little by little. The walk down was easy, shockingly fast and easy, and my knee didn’t start aching at all, which surprised me. I thought we were only about a quarter down, when suddenly we saw we were almost at the trail head! We freestyled it the last 300 or so feet of vertical descent, as the rigors of the climb had already faded almost out of memory.

We headed back to our cabin, and just before the park gate we pulled off to explore a wide wash leading to two low but steep hills. They looked like a piece of cake to climb, but appearances are deceiving. This whole hike was freestyle, and the hill we dubbed “little round top” was a hard climb over and around boulders and slippery fine gravel. When we reached the top both of us were ready to turn back and head home. Only this to say: the flowers on this hike were even more dramatic and dense than on the mountain trail. We were back at the car after about an hour’s hike, and more than ready to chill.

Profiles: Cal is ten years old, medium height and weight, strong. I am 54 years old, slim, and losing my muscle tone: too much thinking, not enough sports.

Scientific Poetic Fragments

Arkettekcherrel Fragmenz Ammung the Ruwenz

1.
You are not what you appear to be.
Consciousness is not a clear glass;
The world is not a polished mirror.
As a drop of water is distinct
     From the vapor that expressed it,
A different state of itself;
As salt dissolved is distinct from its crystal form,
So are we,
From a finer matter condensed into living crystal,
And distorted by sense, and the coarseness of thought.

2.
Speken on the sixth day:
     “O mordel Addom
     “I will kreyate a werl with yu.
     “I will brake yu
     “An grate lite will por frum yur mienz.
     “I will replakkate yu,
     “Bilden bloks aplentee,
     “All simmaller an uneek.
     “I will press yu and twist yu
     “An stress yur hart
     “Tu make yu a lume
     “An weev a bodee a lite
     “Kompilen yur faent flashen.

Excavating Towerlawn Drive, part 2

Continuing from the August 30 post:

II.

What remains of Nineveh, that great city? Or of Babylon, the biblically reviled? Wikipedia, that venerable, and unassailable source says [see Nineveh/archeology]:

In 1847 the young British adventurer Sir Austen Henry Layard explored the ruins. In the Kuyunjik mound Layard rediscovered in 1849 the lost palace of Sennacherib with its 71 rooms and colossal bas-reliefs. He also unearthed the palace and famous library of Ashurbanipal with 22,000 cuneiform clay tablets. The study of the archaeology of Nineveh reveals the wealth and glory of ancient Assyria under kings such as Esarhaddon (681–669 BC) and Ashurbanipal (669–626 BC).

The work of exploration was carried on by George Smith, Hormuzd Rassam, and others, and a vast treasury of specimens of Assyria was incrementally exhumed for European museums. Palace after palace was discovered, with their decorations and their sculptured slabs, revealing the life and manners of this ancient people, their arts of war and peace, the forms of their religion, the style of their architecture, and the magnificence of their monarchs.

A squall of rain was whipping the car as we turned onto my parents’ street. In the whining gusts I could hear ghosts howling: “why have you come to loot this tomb?”

Nancy read my troubled thoughts. She reminded me, “when we go in there, we’ll be confronting your parents and your past in every detail. But remember, we’re here to clear out the debris...” I stopped listening to her, as other voices intervened. “... to recover the core artifacts, and put them on display in a temporary exhibit....”

I had to acknowledge, the ghosts were right on that one. We had come to clean, unclutter, reorder, and depersonalize fifty years of, shall we say ‘eclectic,’ accumulating, for the sake of putting the house on the market to sell. Yes indeed, a ‘temporary exhibit.’

My parents had lived in this house since 1958. In the course of those years my sister and I survived the inanity of the local public schools, escaped to college, and then came and went hundreds of times for holidays, birthdays, deaths, and weddings, but even more often for R&R, to seek forgiveness, or to renew our connections. In those comings and goings we saw a large portion of the house gutted by fire in 1975 and then rebuilt, and at least twice we watched my father’s business become enormously successful only to crumble through his fingers. Like wrestlers my parents bent the full force of their lives against the horns of the economic beast to create a place and a name for themselves. This house was full of the artifacts and gashes of those battles and campaigns.

I was now about to enter the ruins of Nineveh’s treasuries, full of the loot, the literature, the accounting records, the court proceedings, the garbage and detritus etched into the brick, pressed into the once-soft clay, painted on the walls, hung in the corridors, and ground into the hardwood, slate, and concrete floors.

Had this been a treasure hunt or a house-makeover reality show, the emotions of the story would have followed one of a few standard scripts. However, the back story, my parents lives, cast weird, disturbing, and unpredictable shadows everywhere. Here were artifacts fraught with meaning, but of those we ultimately saved, few conjured up an image of my father or reminded me of an experience with my mother. The loving moments, the screaming arguments, the subtle encouragements, the crude demands and manipulations, the laughter, frustration, incompleteness, when we were done, all was missing or existed in a universe tangent or one degree of separation removed from tangent. It filled the house and yet was not there.

We pulled into the driveway, rain overflowing the gutters. We had no key for the weighty, creaking front door. Legend infers there never was one. Our house was always just open when we were kids, and then when we began to drive, my parents installed an electric garage door opener, the first on our block, by damn, with a zapper, so that’s how we got in. Now there was a code box by the garage door, but the car still had its zapper and the old door slowly groaned and rose. And thus we descended into the ancient past.

Ghosts of bygone ages: battles, assassinations, treaties and expropriations, jealousies and defeats, borders drawn and violated, years of growth and abundance, eras of loneliness and tears. All this lay in the damp and musty garage air. What awaited us, not twenty feet away: layers of dust, and objects sunken in their places for the immemorial moments that extend like a thousand years.

I unbent myself from the car, careful not to step in the grease patch left from all of my mother’s cars. That grease had to go: the grease that leaked out of the two-tone ’56 Olds 88, what a bomb, and the ’60 Cutlass station wagon – first year Olds made a Cutlass – and a real bona fide lemon that was, and the red ’66 Cutlass coupe – I blew the engine off its mounts, twice no less, by trying to see how far I could peel tire, revving the engine with the brakes full on till I popped them. My dad must have known what I was doing, but he never said a word. He just clucked his tongue a couple of times, called the tow truck, paid the bills. Then there was the ’76 puke-tope Cutlass coupe they gave to Nancy and me when we agreed to move back to Pittsburgh, so I could work in the company; the ’83 Cutlass wagon and its look-alike, the ’94 clunker we had picked up at Aunt Gert’s 20 minutes before and were just getting out of. All of them had dripped their essential fluids on that particular patch of history to be expunged from our garage.

Excavating Towerlawn Drive, part 1

I.

We landed in Pittsburgh from LA to heavy rainfall. Although I swore, after living in Victoria, BC for twelve years, I never wanted to see another drop of rain, and although LA was doing its best to fulfill that wish, the rain was refreshing. It seemed opulent. Nature’s parsimony in LA is severe, and the rain felt like a great generosity. We came out of the Fort Pitt Tunnel, the glory of The Point before us, quintessential American architecture rising elegantly, full of aspiration, glistening in the evening downpour. And there below, the rivers! What abundance and restrained power. The shuttle driver groaned. “This rain’s killin’ me! Goddam rain forest.”

I suppose when Layard realized he’d found the treasure he’d been seeking, and Nineveh’s bricks and crumbled mortar and cylinder seals drizzled with the sand out of his crew’s shovels, he imagined, among a myriad images of kings and chariots and palace walls and golden idols, a mighty Tigris feeding and flooding the land. What wonders, and what wondrous little remains of that mighty city-state. Even its river is but a shallow stream now.

Every little crick (that’s how we say “creek” in the ’burgh) was swollen and cascading its way to Pittsburgh’s three rivers, all visible as we crossed the Fort Pitt Bridge. Across the bridge, the Parkway turns east, parallels the Mon (Pitt-talk for the Monongahela River) briefly as it passes through downtown, then bores through the Squirrel Hill Tunnel. After the tunnel, Regent Park and Swissvale and the arrows to Kennywood, then up the hill past Wilkinsburg to Churchill, where we cut off the Parkway East into Penn Hills.

Penn Hills is one of those dreary places where Pittsburgh’s working class spread out to build their dreams of economic prosperity, but were mostly dragged down in burdensome routines of small business and trades, while America turned away from steel and smoke stack. We turned into Eastmont, a Western PA Levittown with four cookie cutter house plans laid out in enervating regularity, street after deadening street. My aunt and uncle bought their brick, 900 sq.ft. house in 1955 for about ten thousand bucks. It’s not worth much more now, and that’s where the shuttle stopped. My aunt greeted us with a big hug and laughter. She remembers very little of what went on an hour, a day, or a month ago, but she still knows us well. As Babylon, her memory is increasingly obscured and buried under a mound, her rivers drying out, her forceful personality gone, never to be excavated. My beloved aunt.

We picked up my dad’s car that had to be hidden from the greedy stepmother. The wicked stepmother fable has new meaning to me now. A beat-up ’94 Cutlass station wagon with an out of date registration, but it turned over, and we drove the final stretch to Monroeville and arrived at the mound, the tell where my mother and father built their tiny empire. But the mighty have fallen, first queen, then king, and now three millennia later, three months by calendrical reckoning, my wife and I have come to excavate, not for fame and fortune and the pursuit of grand mythologies like Nineveh’s numerous archeologists, but out of love and sorrow and necessity, and to bring to conclusion two lives, so seemingly well known, already so covered by drifting sands.

Myth of the Eternal Jew

Jews have inspired a remarkable range of mythic images and fantasies. Often those that revile the Jew most viciously, display a profound awe and fear at the same time. For example, the nazis could not compete with the Jew on a level playing field, seeing "him" as too powerful and dangerous, too successful in controlling the minds and obtaining wealth in the society.

I have decided to explore this myth from a Jewish perspective, painting some portraits of faces and personalities, and composing some landscapes and the tragic and miraculous events that take place within them. And embedded in these tales, the hidden immanence of the Divine, as much here with us as it is absent.

This, the opening scene, probably not what you expect:

Miths ov the Ternel Jew

Here I stand, ammung hem tall aeks,
Brambellen bush I am up to my nek.
Louk I over a rivver, its wayz,
Its musselz rippel, o ellaggen, streng.

Down at the shor, all pebbel and sans,
Dans the gerlz, like the rivver thay sway.
Gownz an vaelz all likwiddee wet.
Brests thay sway, thiez a trembel.
Like the tinee waevz tu glitterree sun.

Siy. Du yu heer it? Aspiyerz the wind,
An divvine seeng ov the siyrennee gerlz
Drifts like the mists on the fiyeree wotter.
Don iz kum but the aenjelz doent see me.
Don iz kum. Wy kant yu see me?

This my parabbel now I tell
Ov the ternen Jew, him noktern seeng.
Not even he kan see the don,
And all ov us at the rivver side.
Seeng we dans an taest ov song
But not we understan ov fiyer.
Trembel thi, an sway owwer brest,
And we, messsiyaz, all ov us.
Yes, yu ar tu. Kant yu see?

Dreem on sleeper in yur noktern day.
Woch for hem Jew. Will he retern?
Wut du yu see, o dreemer a dreemz?
That Jew yu see, an yu ar he.
This my parabbel. I that Jew,
And I will tell yu hu yu ar,
And I will tell abowt how far
Frum the donnee rivver and the fade a star.

Take my hand, o dreemee wokker
And let us wok intu the wotter...

Jerusalem, city of peace

The derivation of "Jerusalem," or more accurately "Yerushalliyim" in Hebrew, is "city of peace." Alas. In my post "Natural Gradients" I discuss "Dar al Islam" and "Dar al Harb." You may want to refer to that post if you don't understand what follows.

The following poem postulates a third region, distinct from Islam's Dar al Islam and Dar al Harb (roughly, the Islamic regions of the world, and the regions that are yet to be converted to Islam, "dar" being "region"). This third region is the Dar ov Yoesheya, where "Yoesheya" is the Hebrew for redeemer or redemption. It's grammatical variant, "Moesheya", "that which brings redemption," is another way to refer to this region. Yet a third way is "Israel."

Sittee a Pese, Dar al Yoesheya

Battalyanz aswormen Yerrushalliyim:
Baddel on, o worreyer krass.
Woshen the kobbelz and ashfalt in blud
Then klenz the blud in raen a sarro.
This hows a pese, a howlz a wor.

But a day iz here tho the raen iz por
And a salm iz hum, lissen, lissen klose.
Sittee ov pese an aretz a pese,
A sing arrizzen frum morter and mort.

Tho kingz and kalifs and konkerz kum
Tu brake theze wall, tu bild them pallas,*
                        *others say howlzen,
Oenlee wun Tempel astand in this plase
Tempel a Lor and the Lorz redeem.

Here iz not the LiyonHart grael
Nor evver kontroel ov the Brutish mand.
An here iz alzo not Dar al Islom,
This bak-woddee hole ov kalif land.

An here iz not the Dar al Wor
Ware grabberz grabben and rajerz ror.
Sittee ov Pese iz the Dar ov Hoesheya
Portel ov redeemenz, thay rize and teech.

This therd rejen, haf ov this werl
And haf abbuv iz haf belo.
Raechel an Laya ar wall ov the Plase
Ware moesheyakhs* wok, ware redeemen begin.
                        *Hebrew for “messiah”

Iz Dar ov Moesheya, not ov this werl
Haz a serven preest with a preestee kast.
Yisroyel an hiz mennee shaddiy
Kast by the Lor, kast frum the Lor,
Shaddiy kast ov the Holeyess Lite.

Lost in Ertha

Continuing with my revisions towards a fair copy of The Song ov Elmallahz Kumming, Bouk 6, Gottesverdammerung: In the End ov Time, here is a scene as the nazi war machine overruns a Jewish village in Poland.

A few terms: “Shtettel” is the Yiddish word for “little town” or “village” from the German “stadt.” A “khussid” is a very pious Jew. The two deeply indented stanzas at the beginning of the poem reference an earlier scene in The Song ov Elmallahz Kumming (Levvel 1:1) and an earlier poem series (Elegies en Nance) with a related theme. You can view a slideshow of an illuminated version of Elegies en Nance on Shivvetee.com. Here’s a direct link: http://www.shivvetee.com/theaters/slide_show_elegies/sld001.html.

I Tryd Tu Rezist

                    I tryd tu rezist
                    But then loukt bak.
                    In the rizing Soel
                    Her feecherz touk shape...
                    – Levvel 1:1

Tuday I am nuthing but a shaddo
     And yu ar a Khussid praying,
     Yur boddee a tempel, engulft in fiyer.
                    Today I am nothing but a body
                    And You are a spirit escaping,
                    Rising out of a fire.
                    – Elegies en Nance

Torn frum the handz that wer kasting me.
     Like a potter hu haz throne a pot,
     Kast and spun and eezd it intu shaep,
     And az he lifts it frum the weel
     It slips and kollapsez at hiz feet...

So my God haz kast me frum my huzband.
     Skoopt me frum hiz klay pit,
     Spun me in Hiz Soel,
     Shaept me in Hiz handz;
     Dropt me and left me a shatterz,
           Wile my huzband iz bernd in a kiln.

My God iz kast me owt ov my shtettel:
     The shist we chizzeld tu pile owwer wawlz,
     The klay we pakt tu fase owwer huts,
     The mud that gusht intu owwer shuez;
     The rokkee feeldz that broke owwer plowz;
          That iz my bone, my tung, my hart.

But now a mashene rumbelz down streets,
     It krushez owwer gaets, owwer dorpoests, owwer hoemz,
     It bernz owwer feeldz, it swalloez wut is left.
     Wut du we hav ov valew tu steel?
          Areyanz hav trampeld on owwer saekred skroelz.

I ternd awway and then ternd bak.
     I koud see my streets; even pebbelz and puddelz,
          The krouked windoez and krankee widdoez.
          The Sabbath songz wer lilting on the aer;
     Ower praerz roze up, and fell bak, weeping.
          Now the howl ov Areyanz, rape and skreem.

Descent into Ertha

Here is an excerpt from The Song ov Elmallahz Kumming, Bouk 6, Gottesverdammerung: In the End ov Time. Although the original writing dates from over a decade ago, I am still in the process of revising it and producing a fair copy. You can find other excerpts from this long poem by scrolling down to the list of “Labels” (a bit below the four slide shows), and clicking on “Song ov Elmallah.”

In this particular scene, the Messenger Elmallah stands in his Heaven and looks out over the worlds, preparing to descend into our world, into Ertha. His mission is to lift his loved one, Ertha, from her miseries and inconscience. But the problem is, once he descends into this world, he too becomes blind and lost like us. Yet he must somehow remember his mission and convey his message, his knowledge, to his Bride of Ages, so that she might be able to arise to him in time to come.

The scene begins with an epigraph from an earlier time in history, from Bouk 4, during the reign of the Byzantine rulers Justinian and Theodora.

Az If Planting a Seed
                          The hi preestess assendz the stare.
                              The waevz ov the see bow thaer hedz
                              And wun by wun thay fawl tu thaer neez.
                              With eech prostraten a lo moen rizez,
                              The wotterz speeking in a singel tung.
                              – Levvel 1:4

In my divvine yewth I assend the skaelz
     The waevz ov plezher rush thru my limz
     Thay brake on the shor ov my Soel a thunder.
     O hevvenlee werlz, o hevvenlee bewteez!

In my sworthee yewth, in owwer twilite werld
     The waevz ov unsertentee* krash on my shorz
                    * utherz: konshents
     Awwakening feerz and gilts and douts.
     O devowwering werldz,
          O danjerres bewteez.

O twilite werld with yur fals storreez,
     Yur narrativ mazez, yur pathz inkomplete.
     I stand on the dizzeying ej ov yur klefs
     Preparing tu leep and enter aggen.