XIII
They that fled from the snare stood in the shadow of Hesebon:
But there came a fire out of Hesebon, and a flame out of the midst of Seon,
And it shall devour part of Moab. and the crown of the head of the children of tumult.
What is essential to know in preparing a field for enrollment
Goes as unspoken for those who have worked in a similar fashion,
Much can be grown on thy own but the time will arrive in a moment
When it is needed to head to a city for comfortable ration,
Food for the body or provender feeding the fields and their tenants,
Hungry the flocks and the herds will become in the late of the summer –
Thus to fulfill as I claimed, to restore for a widow a penance,
Carry I shall this purse with its draw-string pulling asunder
Being so tightly endowed with its contents it bulged at its last seam;
Golden of thread, it resembles an off-white daffodil petal,
Still as familiar when I had given the purse in a past dream
Trying to pay for a debt no disbursement affords nor can settle,
Neither the meagerest service I offered today as remittance;
Though the offense of a cold compensation, a brutal and crude kind,
Says of a sort, with finality: “This is thy troubles, a pittance,
Trouble no longer, it lives here, not in my heart nor my shrewd mind,”
Heavy the purse with the shekels to pay for the sins of a man’s life –
What I had done to the widow, suffice it to say, is a burden,
Burden of blood as in every sin, cold heart with demands rife,
Further demands for its cruelest iniquities wishing to burgeon
Filling the fields of my soul with its tares and invasive temptation,
Ask of it what price, then, is appropriate measure to offer
That it departs from my life, and no answer will come for salvation;
Rather, it needs hard toil to root-up, quiet and proper,
Every mile until Kir-Hareseth does so intended,
There it begins to be seen, on the cusp of the darkened horizon,
Walls of a bleak stone not overcome, nor begrudged undefended,
Even in days of the past, men marched on the mountain it lies on,
Formed coalition of Judah and Israel, Moab resisted,
Even to death – as an eve had befallen and pyre was kindled,
Waving its blood-red tendrils about, flames eager and twisted,
Somberly king and his men on the wall trudged, energy-dwindled,
Such was the siege of the city, it tired of war and its evil,
That as the embers of mighty a fire had rivaled the star-light,
Every man gazed long at the king, a comportment so feeble,
Pondering minds trained eyes and observed that eve a bizarre sight:
King with his son in his arms had announced in his tongue his intention,
Chemosh is offered a boy of a royal descent as was fitting;
Pausing, the king sighed darkly with sorrow and great apprehension,
Soldiers beginning to clamor and beat on their drums as his bidding,
Making a horrible sound, I am sure, with its echo of thunder,
After a round of the drums, neared nervous a king to the fire,
Holding his first-born prince as a token of Chemosh’s plunder,
Chanting a treachery making the blaze reach ever the higher,
Over the drums was a faintest bewailing, but drowned were his son’s cries
Even the moment preceding had struck all the witnesses spell-bound –
Silent the crowd watched, crackling branches as bright as the sun-rise
Wrapping around him in total possession the second he fell down;
Only the king had beheld, and recounted, the following terror,
Each of his limbs had contracted in startling form as was Hell-bore,
Opened his mouth in a smile, appearing to laugh at his error,
Grisly reducing until it had clipped in the brazier and fell more,
Never observing again of his son, and the next we recorded
Under the walls in the scrolls of the kings, and a thing so horrendous
Speaking of this can be bordering sin, so I speak of it sordid:
Here had a foreigner god dealt fury so momentous,
Israel fled, and I wonder if this was the god of the nation,
Speaking in flames, or if God had permitted a demon his violence –
What had transpired to warrant, amid God’s king’s explication,
That all the gods of the world had endured in appropriate silence
Save for a time in the past Kir-Hareseth saw an exception
Chasing away the collection of Judah and Israel forces;
What had delivered a fury of sinister, cruel affection
Breeding a fear as to cause all the armies to flee on their horses
Thereby abandoning Moab campaigns for the ages ensuing,
Hastily traveling here on the path I am walking thereafter
Many a century, now a millennia even accruing,
Leaving but dust on the road in the sight of the ancient disaster,
Dust underfoot as uncounted as every horror of nations
Blown by the east wind toward the west sea full of the world’s dead,
Metaphor that represents generation upon generations
Since the beginning of time, still none of the oceans have turned red,
That is the great contradiction, our souls can be squandered emotion,
Passing as sand on the coast of magnificence, easily forfeit,
Meaning so much to ourselves, but is nothing for mighty an ocean,
Small our existence to tides, none yielding enough to transform it,
Here I was too, as I drifted in She’ol before I had risen,
Seen and restored as a particle drawn from the seas of destruction,
Learning the one terse truth: for the living, no woes nor derision,
Labors nor agonies equal the coming conclusion, corruption . . .
Torments are princes, ordeals are the dukes, and the least of all evil,
Bowing before death, king of the terrors, comparisons senseless
Toward inferior devils divided by chasm primeval
Spanning the length of the east to the west, a meridian endless;
While the others may cease, death never attains its conclusion,
Always concluding for others, its own is forgotten,
Nothing persists in its hands, and thy memory fades an illusion,
Flesh will decay, names weather away, and all likeness is rotten,
Blame of me not, for no height nor material forming a statue
Makes it remain in eternity, nothing to change or replace it;
Time will remove its resemblance to thee, with no name to attach to,
Weathered to nothingness whether insc’ence or indiff’rence efface it,
Leaving a land-mark wanting in meaning as much as a rock face,
Deeds unremembered and titles unsaid for a mortal discarded
Like Alexander the Great, who in death is as lost as his lost states,
Greek name bastardized, calling himself of a name disregarded,
Empire squandered among all his friends who reduced it to echoes,
Leapt in his grave and bestowing their own name, not Alexander;
Who can be said to have known Alexander, and not in his frescoes,
Real Alexander, in flesh, who has rot in his tomb of his grandeur,
Nothing of use has survived but his bones as a speck on the winds East,
Blowing from Persia returning to Greece in a wistful insistence —
See, Alexander is nothing but gone, all he wagered has since ceased,
This Alexander we know is as much his existence,
Really, as foot-prints left in the dust can be called our existence,
Not our remains or our souls, but the things we have left to the out-side;
Man is as much of the person he kept as the man of omittance,
What he is not, for a label restricts and defines its about-bride,
Filling the empty before him with every label excluded,
Meaning for meaning as such: we are only as much we elected,
Only as much as we touched, and as much we were not and eluded,
Making the maker of wine as his wine, and the dregs he rejected,
These are the foot-prints left by the Great Alexander in Persia,
Years in the past, but alas! it is not true, man is his spirit;
Names and remains, foot-prints and possessions he left in inertia,
Frozen in place as if waiting for use, for its owner to near it,
Hardly are these to be known with the man and ascribed his achievements,
Rather his life and his soul will remain in ambivalent stasis
Held in the torpor of time and decay in fugacious bereavement;
Neither his deeds nor his hopes are on such an intransigent basis,
Only the man he had chosen for self, and it lives in the dust sea,
Dead and deserted, the dust I will trample upon in my way yon,
Wondering what was the cause for the widow to turn and to trust me,
Trusted enough to be given a purse of her coin as to pay on,
Leaving her life and my own to my barter in town for our day’s bread:
Strange we require of perishing things for sustaining our bodies,
Silver and gold the imperishing, needful in every way said,
Traded for water corruptible, fled from the bottom of wadies,
There it awaits in the walls of the place Kir-Hareseth, boding,
Symbol of wrath and design of the sons of the Moabite quarter,
Laid with a sun-stained brick, unimpressed by its bailey eroding,
Shielding its people unconquered, I pass in the cusp of its border
Noting its burning and cold disposition, a history darkened,
Spread on its fringes as cover for shadows exposited prior;
Lonely the people appear on the road, I devotedly hearken,
Knowing our blood is at war but our coin has its warmest enquire,
Singing my hands and despoiling merchants for grain and their labor,
Traipsing about Kir-Hareseth, foreign but not by its language,
Saving contentions in tragedy’s depths in the past, or for later,
Left with the dust of the dead, earth-eaten, delivered to languish;
This is the truth disinterred: we have furnaced the forge of the nations,
Hammering iron and soil in found’ries of blood and sedition,
Clawing and crawling to cast from the metal our great transformations,
Sterling in quality, blast-kilns dripping with dross for perdition;
What has erupted from vessels of nations of blood we have beckoned —
Weapons for war, and machines for a terrible price in desire,
Making us gluttonous, gorged on the power our devils have reckoned
Worked to effect of so great of a slaughter, its terrible sire,
Time has unleashed, as it passes, an engine so slow a disaster,
Making its spawn goats bleating and bloated with dangerous patience —
Goats, dead-eyed, dumb, stiff in the neck, and an ignorant master;
Cheaper indeed, to have purchased a nation with barley oblations,
Rather to conquer by staining the soul of a people by blood-shed,
Man and his family equally blamed for the violence imparted,
Culpable, every person, as war will have turned all the mud red
Stomped into filth, and the wrath makes pigs of us all, dark-hearted,
Squealing for slaughter! unclean in the sight of the holy of heaven,
Digging our snouts into honors of wicked reprisal we glory,
Judah no longer a people who count weeks numbering seven,
Nothing remains of the promise but what has become of our story
After we mangled our covenant end to be gorged with our rivals
Fat on the plagues we have sown, and the nations have reaped in their violence
What is befitting to violence, a cycle of endless reprisals
Warranted always for wickedness, snared in their snares of defiance —
Always to evil, meriting ashes, for theirs and their victims,
Always to good, to have suffered for evil abandon, abandoned;
Earth grows heavy with death, as yet terror is one of the symptoms,
Man is no closer to God, and although all the seas have expanded,
Raising the question, why God has inspired the man his distraction,
Looking above as if drawn, and unable to enter the white gate,
Longing for heaven, unworthy of heaven, a tragic attraction
Beckoning man and with due haste, want for a portal despite fate,
That he be taken by God as Elijah with chariot burning
Toward the Power and Principle, God everlasting enthroned there,
Present at last and the full satisfaction for us in our yearning,
Hopefully greeting the haunt of melodious wind, the intoned air,
Falling from closed skies, look: it is dead here, nothing is falling,
Pale has emerged in unbroken expanses of azure resplendence,
Poise is personified, this the invincible dome of the sky, and is calling;
Calling my name with a mightiest shout in a tongue of transcendence,
Raptured in mind, inattentive to what I had meant to recover,
Hither I drew, Kir-Hareseth, hither I carried a pittance,
Hither I traded a pittance for barley and colt of another,
Hither depart for a home twixt mountains, unseen in the distance,
Bound for the west, I withdrew to the cover of hills with my chattel,
Helped by the fresh colt carrying barley in saddle and wood cart,
Tugging the reins, I uplifted myself on the crest of the saddle,
Rode with a humble acknowledgement, flush with the trust of a good heart
Leaving the town Kir-Hareseth after a blur of an evening,
Taking no time to repose, so I trudged into dark and surrendered
Facing the wall, the oppressive facade night-falling was weaving,
Gossamer black for the web of a spider, the web I had entered . . .
Sudden it happened, a flash from the crowd and I wavered a second
Not by the face I had seen but the ache of a guilty decision,
Worse was remembering still of another I wronged to have reckoned,
Penance upon more penance; this was my dream or my vision:
Out and about Kir-Hareseth seemed of a man I was tied to,
Known as Baradamah, same in the face, altogether convincing;
Only a glance I was able to grasp, and I found I was lied to,
This was my gloom, to be greeted by guilt and be found reminiscing.
making way for Kir-Hareseth • its history in the Histories
contemplating the terror of death • and warring nations
buying barley and a donkey • mistaking someone for Baradamah