Garden of Delight

Hoo-hoo.    Hoo.
Who, who?    Who?

All beauty, all abundance,
lying in waste
and left to chance;
a garden of delight,
left in your keeping,
fallen into sad plight,
pushed to contortions
of distortions.

The owl’s head pivots,
but, alas, the indignities
lie arrayed in all directions,
and there is no place
where she may lay her head.

Hoo-hoo.    Hoo.
Who, who?    Who?

Who shall stand
when Authority comes,
calling all to account?

“No harm; no foul,”
cry thee unto the hills;
I hear ye, I hear the laughter
as rolling gales of hubris.

“Hang the prophets;
Hang the law,”
they taunt,
“We will do what we want.”

Hoo-hoo.    Hoo.
Who, who?    Who?

Who shall stand
when Authority comes,
calling all to account?

As surely as the sun rises
on the watchers and the holy ones,
Freedom is a sword;
all dance on a razor’s edge.

When the holy Storm comes
with it’s crucible of fire,
know that the angels,
terrible in their beauty,
follow closely after
to wipe away all trace
of offense, all corruption,
and then restore the garden to Grace.

© 2019 by Elisabeth Eliassen

//

I am become as an owl of the waste places.

― Psalm 102:6

But who can endure the day of His coming? And who can stand when he appears? For he is like a refiner’s fire and like a fuller’s soap.

― Malachi 3:2

Life is tragic simply because the earth turns and the sun inexorably rises and sets, and one day, for each of us, the sun will go down for the last, last time. Perhaps the whole root of our trouble, the human trouble, is that we will sacrifice all the beauty of our lives, will imprison ourselves in totems, taboos, crosses, blood sacrifices, steeples, mosques, races, armies, flags, nations, in order to deny the fact of death, the only fact we have. It seems to me that one ought to rejoice in the fact of death—ought to decide, indeed, to earn one’s death by confronting with passion the conundrum of life. One is responsible for life: It is the small beacon in that terrifying darkness from which we come and to which we shall return.

― James Baldwin, from “The Fire Next Time” 

Justice

Guarded
by my lady, Python,
it was a sacred bridge
over a toxic chasm;
those rising vapors,
that did not dull or kill,
spoke
to the adept.

Then, someone said:
if such knowledge is power,
they should not have it;
it should belong to us.

First came one hero,
who slew Python
and kept her skin
as a trophy.

Then came another,
who stole Tripod
and kept it
as a trophy.

Then they made copies of it,
to give away
at the games
—(the rude joke:
it should be ours, anyway;
it has three legs!)—
as a trophy.

In sum,
the tool was taken
by those who had no use for it,
to become a symbol
atrophied.

The mistake,
in all of this,

was taking the tool
to be equal
to the act
of opening
to the holy granting
of knowledge,

was taking the sacrifice
to be a formula
that could be repeated
and reenacted,
written, embellished,
—even redacted
and gutted,
like the snake—
as if the ritual
would always result
in the holy grace.

Deafness and blindness
are the modern trophies
of such hubris;
beyond this truth,
Oracle continues to hear,
but will not speak.

© 2013 by Elisabeth T. Eliassen