The Atlantis Poems
By Linda Pearce
To go straight to the Egypt Poems, click here
I. PROLOGUE
Sometimes in the sky can be seen
the spectra of the elements of mind
illuminated by a shaft of intelligence
that lasers through the atmosphere like wine.
From the study of these spectra we deduce
the origin of All; such colorbars are clues
to why the spirit’s captured here.
In this rare sky the constellations form
like some astronomical divergence from the plain;
the atmosphere reflects the ground below
as far as light can reach.
Atlantis takes its momentary glow
from that sheer mosaic pinned in place by stars.
To learn what we need, we achieve
a perpendicularity of understanding,
an oblique and sideways glance,
a poetic disquisition that touches on the edges of the truth,
and looking up we shimmer past some spiritual threshold,
the spectrum of our own uncharted selves.
Sculpted by the forces of another dimension
the continental womb makes ready for the seed of man.
Across the land is felt the slow movement
of the holographic energizer,
genesis of mountain, cause of shore,
terraforming matter into home.
The blueprint draws its way across the mind;
on this map shall be no terra incognita –
all are granted manumission of the primal fear.
And so these things take place:
The crossfertilization of the sun-site with the star-born;
A precipitate arrangement of the clouds, held firm,
placed in tumbled time, tacked down;
The oceanic basin waits its load;
The rivers introduce themselves to sea, and streams to rivers,
rivulets to streams – the waterfalls intrude,
not subtle in announcement of their birth –
and then, the prophet stream performs
the alluvial baptism of the plain.
The harvest undertaken for the seminal crop
is over now, and new plants form themselves
with particle delight. Observing polarity,
magnetized by light and iron earth,
they drift along the path of the sun.
They breathe out the oxygen of life, and in the heat
there rises the rich caramelization of the sugared air.
What’s left to say? The rhythms put in place,
vibrations tuned and clear, sun high, sky blue,
air flowing through the rippled wheat, the night complete with stars –
the hormones of the earth are sweet and new,
as eager for the birth as the first soft dew.
Inside the first skin that ever was
these few humans dipped on down like windwalkers,
touching with their toes the virgin plain.
It took some time to learn the rules
of earthly limitations, time and space,
being taught the grounding way, and finally
embracing matter like a prize.
Although they felt the dimmed-down density of flesh
their spirits glowed transparent through the skin,
and all had rings of sunset round the eyes.
Shocked to stillness by the first glimpse of sky,
gentled to their first sleep by the hand that built their world,
entranced by weeds in water, mice in the tall grass,
they slowly wrote themselves upon the palimpsest of earth.
And water: rivers roamed like gypsies through their minds.
The ocean lapped its way across their dreams,
built sand-temples in the attic of their minds
and tumbled spiral shells across their thoughts.
All felt the wild-eyed freedom of the wind,
marvelled at the unbelievable flightiness of the birds,
saw each tree to be a seed-house wrapped in bird-song.
And at night they sought no solution for the darkness,
but gloried in the warm black wind.
These were the first people:
fully formed, not born, not children,
they spun themselves together like a web
(all bodies touch for their delight), and
spoon-fed by honey dripping from the trees
they moved their spirits down to flesh,
lay down, and slept.
The Atlantis Poems (cont.)
By Linda Pearce
II. DIALECTS OF LIGHT
Here all geometry is sacred.
From point to point the numbers guide their lives.
With cardinal majesty, ordinal might,
they consecrate their space, invoke an
astronomical intention of delight.
Each one who walks those streets
is blessed, belongs, knows parents well
and yet is more, the foster child
of those who watch the earth.
The purest intimation of the flesh
is here, all boundaries of formative causation
neatly crossed. The life is good,
is goodness as expressed; they taste
the transcendental politics of wine;
he lifts his glass, she drinks it deep.
As gleaming transportation pods
make clear peripherals of sound
they make their way, through green and blue,
through purple silhouettes of fading hills
through water to the iris of the sea,
then stand upon the shore and wait their turn.
The sun dips down and turns the waves to chrome.
Awash with figures stylized in stone,
the obelisk is rising from the foam.
Music partakes of all temporal phenomena:
the same vibration that quivers on the string
keeps molecules in play, plays light in perfect tune,
makes ocean waves lift up and down
like tidal waves of melody and rest.
We play our music with our feet:
our bodies weave bright notes upon the beat.
Music Herself comes and sits in our midst,
smiles at our instruments, hums a little
in the space between the notes,
sways back and forth.
She watches the mad passion of the composer
as he rivets notes to paper with his mind.
Hemidemisemiquavers trickle from his pen.
He hears the thunderous applause of the earthquake,
writes it into place, and turns the page.
Music casts a strong shadow on our lives.
We are backlit by the spiral intensity of the crescendo.
We are all amused by the escapist tendencies
of syncopated time, and hypnotized
by the sweet deftness of the finger-swept guitar,
those arpeggios that ripple up the spine.
And then there is the polyphonic testimony
of our own voices. We testify in song,
bearing witness to the music of the spheres.
We sing the hymn to Atlantis that celebrates the world:
it leaves out no man’s song, nor any woman’s voice.
Long before music discovered its limitations,
we would find ourselves tuning in the soft chromatic night
and looking up at notes too high to reach.
I, Illuminata, was born under the sign of Leo.
On the night of my birth there shone
that animated phosphorescence of the quantalight
that sheets across the north in blue and green:
we have no name for it, for to name it
would be to imply that we understand it,
and we do not.
I am named for all the kinds of light there are,
although like moonlight on the stillest pond
the magic is never in the event
but always in the reflection.
For whatever reason I have become The Builder.
I was born with sycamore and cedar in the bloodstream.
I dreamed of porticoes and rich dark walls,
of avenues of purest stone, and streams
that wept their way down to the formal gardens.
I learned the rules of weights and stresses,
angle and proportion, studied the Golden Section
and proportion and relief.
My instructors wrote the laws
and projected them in my mind:
I often mimic the architecture of the Visitors,
but I admit no impediment to my dream,
my vision of building so that gravity is nought
(gravity just conforms to heavy thoughts).
I love the challenge of doing the never-done,
building the never-built. For instance:
all bridges are best built in the mind,
and in the land where gravity is dead
the bridge is just a decorative arch.
The terrain relapses into itself
and buildings float upon its surface
as clouds upon the air.
We never build from metal, but
only from substances with life:
wood, stone, marble and clay.
I fired my enthusiasm in that youthful kiln
that fixes the most delicate glaze of love
upon the surface of the idea,
the manifestation of the wheel-thrown thought.
I think our city is beautiful
beyond all former dreams of grace:
the sweet integration of plant and water
with hill and hall, the soundplay
that resonates the walls with purest tone,
the crystal windowed eyes
for those within to watch the skies.
They tell me I have internalized my profession,
and it is so. I, Illuminata,
am the living blueprint of the tower of light
that even now is forming in my mind.
They always say that events are foretold in the stars,
as if the stars could speak. If they spoke
what language could they use except the language of light –
all heavenly bodies speak the same tongue:
moon-glow and tails of comets are all just dialects of light,
a dialectic that moves us to their point of view.
They put the accent on the first syllable ever spoken,
and the rhythm of their speech foretells with pure exactitude
the cycle of their return. So we decode their tongue.
Starbursts pack their meaning in the lines;
all darkness is the space between the sounds.
They group themselves, those stars,
while planets wander in and out their paths.
In twelve we cut the heavens, parse the dome above our world.
We map events to sectors in the sky.
We study the probability matrix of the constellations.
We listen to the glockenspiel music of the spheres,
hear the ratatat-tat of stardrops on the roof,
see the cascading subterfuge of what only appear to be falling stars.
The stars and planets, comets and constellations
are the cyclic timepiece of our universe, and more:
the crystalline harbingers of all events on earth.
The models of their slow revolving wake
prefigure all our own slow turns,
and in their beauty show us our own grace.
We are a match for stars.
The magus holds his classes in the round
charmed by water and fire.
Surrounded by his pupils,
those eager would-be masters of the real,
he watches while they listen, rapt,
sitting near the softly glowing fire,
the ancient wisdom curled at their feet.
With the tip of his lasered wand
he occasions dimensional shifts.
He reads the crystal skull,
and by some alchemy of his own
he takes his pupils through an extrapolation
of the senses into the dimension of the skull.
He calls himself the mystical masseur,
pummeling their minds and their beliefs.
Magic is the prime expression, indivisible by fact,
and yet it smacks of two, duality, polarity –
real, not real; seen, not seen.
When magic first appeared
it astonished the Creator with its charm.
Magic disrupts the boundaries around our minds,
turns raisins into grapes, flowers into seeds,
and seeds back into the will of God,
for magic takes the miracle to heart.
The magi bring the candle to the dark.
Their gifts have brought Atlantis to the light,
foretelling the sombre sweetness of the gifts
they give the Christ.
The magi lived ten thousand years before their time,
perfecting skills they never knew they’d need.
Technicians of the sacred,
they rode the jetstream of the future.
What does this mean to us? Are we to understand
the contrail of the miracle with our eyes?
In my garden in the secret night I spend the waiting hours
pruning the mythical moonflower, and listening to voices in my mind.
To rule Atlantis I must take the magus’ knowledge for my own.
He waves his cape; you hear the silk-washed slide
of magic moving sideways in the dark.
Free play drives the universe; in this bright place
work and play are coincident. Thus, in the evening,
when they undertake the dissection of the day,
the sweetened hours are turned and turned about,
relived and cherished, and finally put to rest.
At dawn, each soul returns, reshapes itself to start the day,
then moves surely forward, along the train tracks of the heart.
To start the day with prayer,
to pass the statuary sheltered by the trees,
to see the shrine in the work place, play place,
is enough. Here the word for sacrifice is quite unknown.
The masterful dictation that they hear is this: have joy.
Expediency dictates harmony, and manifests itself in many ways;
heterogeneous displays of affection crowd the day.
Even the darkest corners fill with light,
and jasmine scents the alleyway.
With brevity, clarity, purity
all is made, processed, invented, created,
organized, coordinated and supplied.
Such suppleness of purpose gives them joy,
and at the end of day, as rapture approaches the time-door,
expectation suffices for them all.
They know that growth appears when mind meets will;
so Atlantis in her youth is growing still.
The cradle rocks the child into the world;
all children enter so. Here they are held,
smiled, set upon their feet,
ready to release their newborn energy
into the dimension of their birth.
They feel the crayon freedom of the childish fist,
the zip of speed that makes their faces round,
all the ephemeral joys of the truly young,
their upturned faces risen to the sun.
Here the special friend that no-one else can see
IS seen, and welcomed in, and given tea.
The rule-maker never passed this way,
and in their elders the critical eyes of the young
find no hypocrisy to rail against.
Racing through tall grass in dead of night
they find upon the ground the firefly traces
of the falling stars that lit their way.
In sun their skyward toys are lifted by their minds,
orange, yellow, red, their kites conniving with the wind,
and afterward their waterplay makes dolphins of them all.
All animals are kindred to their souls:
a hummingbird has stopped them in their tracks.
They watch, transfixed, while absently patting the fierce soft fur
of a passing leopard. Their senses come alive:
the tongues that tasted rain, and then a plum,
have passed the taste test of this ambrosial world.
With the strict logic of childhood they know
there is no other world than this, until
deduction brings them their maturity.
In this school there are no marks;
their auras are the measure of their growth.
As bright as kites they spin the colored air
with their delight.
We preach the medicine of light;
by choice the body heals, and,
comforted by mind, makes holy space
for all abiding here.
Here you will never find
the chill obedience of the terrified soul,
wrapped in the surgeon’s diagnosis
like a shroud. The surgery is locked,
no knives are used. The focus of the mind
is sharp enough to trim the wound.
Let hatred cause no harm, let fear depart –
all powers are known. The smallest child
cures headaches with a smile.
My training, far from here,
took place where I could see the earth below.
Through graceful adaptation of the cosmic rule
I there was taught to heal, to see the aura,
to love and deduce in equal part,
to use those medicines the earth provides.
I sought out those bright jewels of healing lore,
the test-tube treasures of the living lab, and now
the sea provides the herbs, and land the shells.
From time to time I recall my lessons:
how to extract from grass pure chlorophyll,
then to reconstruct from it the plant energy light –
a reverse engineering of the solar wave –
and then to learn when the injection of this light
into the cornea would assist in diseases of the brain,
or in rejuvenation after surgery.
I, Manutius, have opened many doors
that lead past death, and in my work
have garnered the techniques that make us whole:
the spot removal of the laser touch;
the electrode amplification of the will;
the acupunture stimulus of the web,
the ley-lines of the spine,
the subtle force that threads that web;
how toning is the essence of the cure – to
rearticulate the natural rhythms,
to drum and hum and sing life into place –
and to respond with grace;
how crystals reunite the sundered cells;
and, best of all, most comforting to soul,
the marinated pleasure of the spa.
We can regress in time to heal the hurt before it starts.
Life leaves no holes inside our time.
There are therapies, and then there is
the perceptual mind pause, space to heal.
All of these are followed by the best:
for whether sick of body, or depressed,
or simply needing solace for the heart,
the water flows. Past waterfalls of foam,
and fountains in the square,
and lovely marbled minerals of baths
the patient makes her way,
scattering sundrops in the wake of her dream,
soothed to slumber by the murmur of the stream.
Yet I, Manutius, physician of Atlantis, tell you this:
If you but press your fingertips to your temples
you have there, between your hands,
that place of worship that heals all:
the ever-sacred temple of the mind.
You know that light cannot be seen
except where it touches matter.
How odd that things so critical to life
are yet invisible to view:
the insubstantiality of the air,
the love that drives the plants up from the soil,
the time that lets me be here, in this place.
Truth cannot be found in landscape,
yet landscape clearly reflects the mind
of the one that creates it.
And so, this garden: the foliage
speaks volumes to the eyes –
a glance is worth a thousand words:
cucumbers tucked safely under leaves,
mangoes smelling of heat and sex,
the shy brilliance of a primrose.
Past the treed elegance of the turnstile
the orchard bears its fruit,
to match our ripened times.
Looking up I see clouds in the sun-tree,
I follow the bright reflection of the snail’s path.
These gardens owe their life to sons of man
who hoed and tidied, fed and weeded,
to daughters of the gods who knelt for hours
and tenderly brought seedings from their home.
The plants ex-pire, breathe out, breathe heaven
into lanes that once were dirt.
In a small corner, the herb garden,
feathered by the wind,
speaks softly of the human body.
We plant for life, and health,
for beauty and for breath,
and when the body dies we plant for death.
Neither are the plants immortal;
it’s not for lack of care that some plants die.
Their time has come, and they are cropped
for the season of another time and place.
This is the place of my greatest hearts-ease.
And when the light grows long
I leave beside the stream, with love,
my floral tribute to the ones
who plant us all, those beings from the stars
who brought the seeds. I lie in the long grass
and watch the sweetly scented sky begin to glow.
Prothemia sees the sun arise each day.
She never sleeps past dawn.
Her bare feet step across the lawn
before the light breaks free from the hills,
pulling back the drawstring of the sky.
She exults in this, feels joy so fierce
she often leaves a tear upon her cheek
to crystallize the light upon her face.
To touch the sky she circles with her arms,
conjuring pleasure for the coming day.
She’s young. Her children lie potential in her womb,
not yet ready to grace her life with motherhood.
All the exposed rapture of the defenceless heart
is here, radiant on her flawless face.
And in this place she’s safe; her whole life long
shall be three hundred years of perfect peace,
yet filled with the taut experiments of life,
new tastes created every day, the thrill of speed,
the out of body ecstasy of God.
Even if all other joys were gone,
the beauty of this day would be enough.
Prothemia breathes beauty with the dawn.
In the best of times our science matched our lives.
We wrote the Atomic Manifesto:
here our power starts, and stops;
here science is always servant, never master;
here we licked the antimatter blues.
We had no time for the medieval engine of desire,
nor for any mythical reliance on electricity.
Our science is much more subtle, adapted to pattern:
we studied the waves frozen on the fractal shore,
found ways to defrost that geometrical sea.
Following our own positronic pathways
we undertook the neon exploration of the dark.
We forsook all plebeian interpretations of power.
In a vacuum powerfully resonant of creation
we merged our subatomic minds, to form
the astrodynamic thought generator that built our times.
Through glass there could be seen,
in a never-ending pulse-defying dance,
the neuron neutron partnering we forced
in our long attempt to reinvent the real.
In the architecture of this science
the cranial superstructure predominates,
towers above the tugboat of the soul,
substitutes transportation in a thought bubble
for the slow progress of the spirit ship.
We build, light, grow, move,
power and communicate all things,
and all through means invisible.
Here pylons do not march across the sky,
nor engines terrorize the air with noise.
Quite silently we fuel our times;
there is only to be heard the low hum
of atoms moving in the mind.
In collusion with the never-born
they built the amphitheatre of the mind;
so row on row the watchers heard the words
and saw the play as written out by man.
Enchanted by the alphabet they wrote the script
that made Atlantis great, the play of power,
while, watching from the plinth,
the crystal skull stood sentinel alone.
In this profound meeting place
the adjudicated mystery found instinctual communion
with the hearts of those who watched:
some came to worship, drawn to test their lives
against the rest, and some to rest are drawn
by praying minds.
Here they felt, unforced,
the spontaneous mind refraction which they sought,
turning their three-dimensional lives to four
in the cosmic tesseract of joy.
And then at dawn, above the ancient columns on the hill,
there lifted up like pinnacles of fire in blinding light
those wayfarers of the past returned again,
to mark with mind the peoples of the plain.
In the house of God, the Proprietor leaves the door ajar.
I have come into that house, and this is my voice:
the voice of one who listens.
I see the souls parked end to end,
drawn up before the door of God.
I slip between the cells of my own life
and take the capillary way to the heart of truth.
Faith gives us the patience to wait for knowledge,
and knowledge gives us faith because we see.
I am not your priestess; each must find his own
slow way to truth, and yet the symbol for infinity
is looping in an endless link between our souls:
you may be mine.
I look for lotus hearts, wide open to the world,
and there are many such.
Remembering, we hurry from the womb
to tell our new-met parents where we’ve been.
We consecrate our wisdom to our bones,
so all our actions speak of our beliefs.
In this concentrated petrie dish of flesh
the soul seed grows,
the heart becomes the lotus that we seek.
We live our lives in this blessed place beside the sea.
We value wind and water, light and fire,
because they come from Thee.
Ritual is impetus for thought and inner search
but the only worship that there is, is this:
we offer thanks, and listen for Your blessing.
Those who placed us here might have us worship them;
their obelisk is carved with signs of fire.
In this marble marketplace of myth it would do well for us to think:
the comic house parade of priests and kings would drag us down,
and make all their concerns for us our own.
We must avoid the temporal misapprehension of the truth
that afflicts those here on the cross of matter.
Symbology speaks to the roots of the soul
but religions abhor symbols not their own.
If we become a church we will devolve in time
to the frozen gratitude of the thankless heart.
If we become our Selves,
Atlantis will be sacrament enough.
I, Perpetua, am come to tell you of the time of love.
Twin souls search for meaning in the loins;
with all the blistering purity of the sun-child
we seek that spectacular mind conjunction,
the ventricular fusion of our hearts.
Our priestess told us fire begins below;
she says our church is made of flesh and bone.
And in that time of joining when we prime the pump,
pump the deep-felt throb from the cavern of delight,
that well of ecstasy that moves its surface slowly in the dark,
we speak the sonic body language of our love.
I speak of starwave foreplay;
the accelerated rhythmic echo of the equinox
that rocks us back and forth, the distillation
of harmonic resonances into human form,
ejaculating children full of joy.
In this joining I reach the atomic freedom of the sun,
feel the excruciating black-hole wonder
of my trip through inner space.
I praise the Love that gave us sex
to feel such love.
The Atlantis Poems (cont.)
By Linda Pearce
III. THE DEVOLUTION OF PARADISE
They say now that we are really separate,
that all our thoughts must be our own,
that the mystical union of God with “I” is just illusion,
a trick of the light. I remember as a child
I thought we all were really One,
but was later taught to know myself alone.
On an observation platform high above the earth,
three Entities sit assessing our fate.
They watch us here amassing all this wealth,
rejecting unity, embracing the material politics
of our household goods. The entities are shy,
and do not easily express their individual dismay.
They speak in tones. They lift their graceful hands,
whose fluid motions in the air project their thoughts.
What the entities are saying can be thus expressed:
“It was our task to guide you well.
It is our pain that we have failed.
It is your fate that earth must bear the burden for us all.
We see the paths of men must be erased.”
Well, I for one cannot believe that this will happen.
Our scientists know better than that.
They, who create whole animals from cells,
who with genetic manipulation can bend the brightest flower
to become a scent, a lemon-lie in the sun,
who master the atom, who transplant brains and lives –
they, our scientists, will rescue us from this.
I refuse to worry about it. I must go and have
my skin smoothed; I haven’t had it done for weeks.
In the air the molecules of shame are beginning to cluster,
silently, targeting the oxygen of life, absorbing and expanding
to incorporate the atmospheric guilt that girds the globe.
It’s highly combustible, and just underneath are
the thousand sparks of ego living in each soul.
The observation platform is deserted.
The first stars appear low on the horizon,
shimmering oddly in the strange changed air.
We scientists have now become amateur magicians
practicing the desperate alchemy of our times.
With open hands we lay the results of our work
on the altar, and watch the blood run down.
Creatures too obscene to imagine
breathe a few gasps and blessedly expire.
Foods that glow are the outcome
of our atomic resurrection of the earth.
Our bodies sicken, only slightly behind our poisoned minds.
We had the world in our hands. We had all powers.
We said Be and It Was So. And we were proud:
all collapsing indications in the forcefield
were wilfully and carefully ignored.
The high but unstable vibration we achieved
opened the tidal door to the oceanic deeps.
We played the games that kill,
forfeiting the atmosphere on a roll of the dice.
The stars glitter over the blasted plain
like a diamond necklace on a corpse.
Attempting resuscitation, we rush to our labs
where the magic apparatus makes its home.
Feverishly we invent our preparatory prophylactics.
As best we can, we retrofit the technology to our times,
but we have lost the amulet that was the key.
It has been twelve years since the obelisk
has risen from the shore, and the crystal skull
that controlled the power generator has disappeared.
Some say s t o l e n.
Stolen is a word that is new to us,
but there are many new words coined every week:
crime, war, theft, mutations, profit motive,
assault, conspiracy, fear fear fear –
a whole new dictionary of disaster is in the press.
And each new word reflects in all its despair
the loss of our sense of the sacred,
the sense which underpinned our world
for so many centuries.
There is of course a magnanimous profusion of advice.
One can now get a computer-generated astrodynamic starchart,
full of probabilities and educated guesses.
With our new paranoid magic, with daily incantations,
we still invoke the emblems of the past,
remembering the glyphs that once were full of meaning
but seem now like pictures in a child’s coloring book.
The magus in his heart is all alone,
attempting a feverish reconciliation of the symbols,
forestalling the sulphurous future with his spells.
Those who have had in recent times most power
are now most vulnerable to the great decay,
the newly lowered standard of dying.
Long years of creating cold wars and hot wars
have produced in them a sort of feverish chill,
the kind that brings on visions of apocalypse,
and disjointed utterances of doom.
Everywhere they look they see
the pitiful plague of the underfed,
and know that there is no posy which can
prevent their joining in those awful ranks.
It’s surprising how many have found
the waiting just too hard to take.
In a heart-broken slip-slide
they are lurching one by one
off the icy narrow ledge
that best describes these times.
No one knows why some take the solitary leap
that all of us will take together soon enough.
It must be some response to fear that’s private,
and intensified by living in castles in the sky.
Going up the royal walk, we make our way
through the rusted gates.
Where once there were fountains,
there is only a remnant of tile
that’s too crazed to be true.
And just there, under the crumbling balcony,
the courtyard is marked with the outline in chalk
of the King of the Palace of Fears.
They’ve begun to put stone gargoyles
in the corners of the square
to ward off the evil that we fear.
The streets are filled with predictions of doom,
and a dark halfpenny silence often fills the air.
Now in the city, even during the greatest celebrations,
there is an existential sadness at the core,
as though our sweetest hopes lay weeping in the dark.
The men have taken up the testosterone challenge of the day.
Convinced they know it all,
they send their gargoyles to storm the battlements of the future,
but to me the gargoyles are just dead stone,
like the trilobite remnants of our past.
This sounds so fanciful. Of course they’re only stone,
and meant of course just to symbolize the obstacles of nature
that our society (and our science) has overcome.
How nature became quite so recalcitrant I’m not sure,
but calcification seems to be the order of the day.
I could make a skeleton complete
from the articulated bones of my despair.
Perhaps my bitterness is premature; there isn’t much to see.
Things are much as before, really. It just that I can’t help noticing
the fracture lines in lives that used to be so whole. For instance:
Our doctors have redefined the body.
Where once the health of mind was reflected
in the body full of life,
where doctors tuned and toned,
gave soft advice and herbs to clear the skin,
they speak too often now of the disease-ridden enemy of the cell.
They cut and burn, in some bewildered attempt
to exorcize what can’t be understood.
Our leaders have become politicians.
Abandoning the old ideal of service
they have substituted power and design,
and in the powerful profusion of the marketplace
they have become the merchants of greed,
spinning their vortextual lies to the unwary.
They now would have us vote,
and by some psychomanipulation of the brain
would influence our very thoughts.
Quiet reason and intuition are drowned out
in the dark resonance of the loudspeaker,
that medium for the apoplectic regurgitation of the party line.
We seem now to need a kind of prophylactic protection
against the elements. The world that used to be so sweet
is full of torment; where once it gave us gold
there is now a low rumbling in the mother lode.
There can be felt some perturbation in the hologram.
The fiery prognostications of the prophets
speak of earthquake and hurricane,
and the tsunamic response of the irritated sea.
We have forced the nitrogen termination of the soil,
and the withered remnants of the harvest
are reluctant to provide us with our bread.
The earth suffers our presence as a mare her mounting.
Seers sit distressed beside the sea
in search of an alternate reality,
sweeping all their visions out of sight,
prognosticating with the inner eye,
while still attempting sadly
to deny what they already know.
I hear their voices in the waves:
“You think the world will speak
when upside down
the oceans spill their sperm?
You think the clouds will spell
the words of doom
in shapeless sentences of mist?
The voice that tells that time
is not of earth,
and those who’ll cower here
have naught to say.
For only those who stand
with souls upright
and those who built themselves
like granite, meant to last,
and laid upon the level
laid by God,
the sacred selves who resonate to life,
will turn and stand amazed
at those who fell,
at those who never spoke,
nor heard, the spell.”
Any detective spying out our land would see the obvious truth,
could hardly ignore the gumshoe relevance of the fact,
but it’s ostrich time: our clearly written fate
is there for all to read, but no one ever does.
Carved in stone, the symbols tell the world
the autotruth it already knows.
Sweet baby peacock!
how poetry disturbs the truth,
and unmasks all the comfortable lies.
How truth disturbs the poem,
and magnifies the portent.
A woman stands in long grass
under the night sky
and in her vision, sees,
far in the future,
Cassandra standing in long grass
under the night sky,
seeing in her vision
the coming death of all she knows.
The tilt of the earth has changed
by more than a fraction of a degree:
there is a subtle adjustment in the time zones.
The days, no, the years, are growing colder.
Perhaps it’s the icy burden of our cryogenic technology
foreshadowing an ice age for us all.
There is certainly a psychic dissonance
that marks some aberration in the forcefield.
The time has come to document the delirium,
to write our tale in paragraphs of stone
to thus ensure that, far in the future,
those who see will read not just the title,
but the catastrophic subtitle, of our lives.
The future rushes headlong into the past,
and by some partial disclosure
we wish to de-doom our ending,
but there is so much to carve
that we are perplexed by problems of scale.
What piece of stone, however great,
could show the richly textured marble of our times?
We chisel out the lines
with the velocity of erosion.
We begin at the beginning,
where we encountered our Visitors
coming out the IN door,
and then we write the centuries
of our greatest joy, and then
of the long slow slide
to who and where we are now.
We kept our dreams in bottles
clearly marked ‘not for resale’,
until the commodification of money
put them on the market,
sold to pay the interest on our debts.
We needed no ministers or priests
until the investiture of the scientist
as the head of our secular church
made us doubt our own prescience –
perhaps it was pre science after all.
Now in the aftermath of technology
the smallest creatures are the first to pay the price.
The worm’s opinion of the tenacity of the robin
is necessarily different than the human valuation
of that same trait. We have tenaciously destroyed
our very earth. What we are documenting so carefully
may be nothing less than the demise of Gaia.
And, our deeds straddle even the biosphere;
at dusk we see the menstrual overflow of the bleeding sky –
we aren’t sure what is wrong, but we do know
there is some mischief in the curtain zone;
perhaps no future eyes will see our constellations again,
since they do not exist except from this particular point in space.
And yet if the earth herself survives,
some one may come to theorize
the precession of all human civilizations,
moving slowly backward and yet always forward,
echoing our own slow rising and waning:
all rhythm attracts return.
Perhaps, like leaves, there is a Fibonacci repetition
in the growth of civilizations and the branching of the stars.
Meanwhile, on the pillars,
they are carving, leaf and branch,
our family trees, and underneath
they write the long list of our dead.
Someday one may stand upon the shore
where we went down, and wonder
whose last breath under the water
has caused the effervescent bubbles on the sea.
Of all the things I cannot understand
the strangest one is this: that our Creators –
our visitors, overseers, comforters and advisors –
have left us in our time of greatest need.
We have searched for them with all the instruments at our command:
telescopes and microscopes, sextants and astrolabes,
metal detectors and geiger counters, crystal balls and darkened mirrors.
We have done exploratory surgery on the body of our past,
but of our Creators we can find no remaining trace.
We are like old men scavenging among the suspenders
for something that will hold us up.
With resignation we re-draw the maps
to reflect the shrinking borders of our times.
Outside the lines we write Here Be Dragons,
drawing fiercesome beasts
around the increasingly blurred edges
of what used to be our lands.
And no One comes to dispel our newly created fears,
to disabuse us of our faulty notions,
to correct the cartographic errors of our minds.
We seem unable to undertake the digestion of an ancient fact:
that turning with the world, inevitably,
are the long slow cycles of its destruction and rebirth.
We have seen the naked branches, naked trees,
fossilized by long ages of neglect.
We have seen the carbonization of the fern leaves,
the water levels high on mountaintops,
and small shells stranded many miles from sea
like decorations for a festival that ended long ago.
All these signs are tacked to the walls
in the schoolroom of history, but the teachers
never come here anymore, and they have removed
the psychic implants that were so vital to our understanding.
Perhaps we were for them just a test in ideational theory,
a result of some experimental algorithm of colonization,
unloved although they parented our souls.
There are some who think this,
having lost their faith in what they cannot see
yet hoping for a rescue even so.
We are caught in a gargantuan squeeze-play
between our sad and hopeless present, and
our dim uncertain fate.
I wonder if, at the end, our Visitors will reappear,
standing at attention like bright and breathless flames
and opening the Time Door for us all.
The Atlantis Poems (cont.)
By Linda Pearce
IV. THE RIGHTNESS OF THE ESSENTIAL POSTURE
My grandmother remembers the time
when birds came to the festivals,
bearing nuts and seeds for the dancers,
and singing sweet songs of far-away islands.
Those thousand birds have long since made
their thousand minuscule appointments with death,
and yet new birds still hatch
to carry branches far across the sea.
In the pine-drenched aftermath of the summer
my grandmother is seated on the ground,
gazing at the valley far below.
She clearly sees, and knows, what will befall,
and yet she never weeps.
She says “If there is snow where once was grass,
can that be cause for grief? If all of us should die
only to be reborn as turtles in some moonless ocean
many light years away, then we shall live as turtles,
and move our flippers slowly through the sea.
If Atlantis be destroyed and the earth sent spinning
out of orbit in a hapless abandonment of the sun,
could it possibly matter?
The universe is always open to suggestion:
our souls say Be and always It Is So.
There shall simply be a reformation of the spirit world,
with new rules tacked to new and bigger doors.
“All showmen know the relative insecurity of the trapeze,
and yet for mere applause they nightly climb the steps
that may lead to their deaths, doing what they do,
downplaying the significance of the frailty of the rope.
It is so easy to achieve the massacre of the acrobats,
and yet it is they, even in their slow and twisting fall,
who know the rightness of the essential posture.
“Even as I hear the orgiastic symphony
of time that’s near its end, I know
the music speaks of magic in the wings.
Just as turtles carry the world on their backs
so sound supports the ceiling of the sky,
so music takes the load from failing hearts,
so all the songs we sing bear heaven up.
“If pieces of our shattered earth may soon
create new sandpits in the lunar playground,
then I shall take my playmates to the moon
and make a monument in sand to what we were.
“In all universes, my child,
love is the currency of the heart,
freely spent and earned,
devalued only by the fear
that anticipates its loss.
Without the fear your love may buy you
castles in the air, and other souls will smile
to see your turrets effervescent in the sky.”
The day is nearly over when she finishes speaking,
and we rise to leave the mountain. The late sun
intensifies the irrepressible glitter of our beloved world.
A hummingbird makes its tentative foray
into the crimson trumpet of a flower –
my grandmother laughs for joy.
The Atlantis Poems (cont.)
By Linda Pearce
V. EPILOGUE
Prothemia watches while the buzzards sing
their joy in the passing of all living things;
they crowd the courtyard, thrustle through the tombs,
elbowing each other with their wings.
And yet she feels no horror at this sight,
nor pain in knowing that lives pass,
are over, finished, gone. Her firm belief
is woven through her cells.
Something else may come of this.
For Atlantis to return requires us all,
those souls who lived those times before,
to meet again, to recognize, to face
and turn about, and work as one
to build Atlantis here.
I send my words to you,
and I expect that you shall send them on
till I receive them back, charged up
by such another citizen of time
who still remembers how the world should be.
So many left, and now so few return;
we must remain the core of those who know,
rebuilding links to beauty with our minds.
After ten thousand years we’ve come
to reinvent Atlantis in our time.
The Egypt Poems
By Linda Pearce
THE INVITATION
Egypt takes her place beside the reeds,
gathers her skirts, dips toe in Nile,
then turns to watch the sky and sand.
She sees the Trojan sphinx
(which harbors God Knows What),
sees pillars in place of trees,
sees the dunes advance
in a classic symphony of movement,
follows the punctuation lines
up the pure clean edges of the pyramids.
On the floodplain, in season,
she washes herself slowly, dreamily,
then turns inland and cleans her teeth
with the radical floss paper of the sandstorm.
At last, spellbound by the invitation,
she crosses to the oasis and kneels by the spring,
murmurs something no-one understands,
writes it in a language no-one reads.
There’s some exclamatory principle behind it all:
she’s so extreme! Her magic is a kind of arid voodoo,
paralyzing those who seek her out,
bending them to some will not their own.
Her mummies are all long in the tooth –
even after death they’ve had their day;
could they have anything left to say?
They’re bereft of what narrative force they had,
yet their curatorial impact seems intact.
In a hot dry space, year by year,
the archaeologists are scraping flesh from bone.
One moves across the crawfish sands,
and raising the tent flap
takes his pen and fills his paper
with the acronyms of the academic desert,
employing the stepped up ideology of the transformer
which takes knowledge and changes it to dogma.
Yet Egypt herself operates in a field of endeavor
of which we are entirely ignorant,
exercising always the options of the Oracle:
it is only we who trip over the roots of the decision tree.
So this is how she is. It’s as though
the aridity of her surroundings
is significant in the context of her mystery,
and yet why should this be so?
Egypt lies in the desert on her back,
palms up, her throat is dry as dust;
all her knowledge is drifting down to the delta
year by year, endlessly
fertilizing the subsoil of our curiosity.
The Egypt Poems (cont.)
By Linda Pearce
I AM
I am the Movement and the Mover
I apply the force of my will to the material universe
and on the fulcrum of my own existence
shift the world on its axis
those who walk the earth are made by me
but even more than that, they are made FROM me
from the same substance that I am they are
I send them up the shadow-wall until their birth
when bursting forth they open up their eyes to see my light
I perpetuate all things: I steady my attention
on each atom of the cosmos, focussing my All on its affairs;
if I should slip, each atom each bird each human
would slide back into Me the endless ocean of Me
I sit at the feet of my own creatures
I love to see their faces, pulse their hearts,
dream their dreams and live with them their lives.
I love to see their eyes and hear their ears
I set myself a space wherein my plan can unfold
in all its glory and steadfastness
in all its tenderness and love. They know not
wherein the plan they live
they gaze steadfastly at themselves
they call on me in my various manifestations
they pray to the light, or to the dark,
to Horus or to Set, to Isis or Hathor
to my sun-self Ra
they pray for themselves (little-knowing
that those are the only prayers I will not hear)
I am the stone in the pyramid
the bead on the necklace
the still pool of the oasis
I am floodtide and famine
light and dark
life, death and the afterlife
the temple and the idol and the screen
I am the goddess
who is nurturing the god
who nurtures all.
The Egypt Poems (cont.)
By Linda Pearce
INITIATION
This is the day of my initiation
I am spiced like cinnamon
I smell the sweet tree of the life-line
I ride the currents of the sugared wind
I see the smoky spell before the lines are drawn
I am commanded to see
with the eye which looks within
I gaze at larger worlds
at greener greens
I see the way I know
that colour smells
Spun around me from the ether is my robe
and threaded with the lines of force I weave;
for my sisters I bear the weight of this gown
my surrogate for skin
I feel upon my skin the coming change
there are no words
I open from within
I feel the flame that has no heat,
burning in the chandelier of time
I see without my eyes,
blinking my way past the image on the retina
my tongue is still I have been taken into the heart of matter
and left upon the altar of the soul. I move
I flow like quicksilver down my own channels
into the rapture of the Matrix.
The Egypt Poems (cont.)
By Linda Pearce
WE ARE THE PHARAOH
We are the Pharaoh. Through countless years
all of My successive bodies took their part,
inhabiting the throne as was their right,
looking alike yet not-alike, Our similarity
inherent in Our connection to the gods
of whom We were many.
Our one-pointed disparity was hardly understood,
We spent so many years inhabiting the spiral
that drew Us up and down.
Before We came
this land was bare: while beautiful,
there were no works at all that spoke of man
or his own connection to the gods.
Summoning the architect, We made Our wishes known,
and now you see Our works standing in the desert,
commemorating Our absence.
I cannot say that each of Our incarnations succeeded.
Like you, We had our vampires, our ouija boards,
Our voodoo dolls and visits from the shaman:
one of Me slipped sideways now and then.
It’s true We were not scribes,
and failed sometimes to write Ourself truly on the page,
and sometimes We paid a toll in the service of beauty,
forfeiting Our mission to a smile.
But after We finished starbinding the priests
We were able to achieve the meditative progression of alchemy
We required in order to convert their strangely leaden thoughts
into the spun gold of the true ideals.
We were no flash in the pan:
between My many incarnations
We achieved a steady state for this land;
We made up for the failures of technology with molecular genetics,
set up a system of internal justice (adjudication delights),
tried to convey what We knew of Our own fortitude,
and morphed Our way on and off the earth
in a blizzard of golden light.
So bright is the past behind Us
that We cast long shadows into your time.
And yet your adulation palls; We tire
of your earthly applause for Our failures,
of your artificial homage to the past.
Who among you will judge Our successes,
when you lack all understanding
and all judgment.
We are the Son of Horus:
never think that you understand Us
from a casual trip to the waxworks.
The Egypt Poems (cont.)
By Linda Pearce
SKIING THE PYRAMIDS
Moving backward to the pyramids
I wonder about the nature of their genesis –
was it construction? or creation? or birth?
Humans build and spirit creates,
but only life gives birth:
incarnation reels at the thought!
Yet the pyramids have certain organic traits:
we do not know they did not grow from sand
which grew to stones and then to slabs;
we do not know in fact the pyramids weren’t born
from some enormous granite womb;
we do not know they have not watched
and listened all these years;
we do not know they are not breathing now.
Well, enough of this freeform reverie:
my palette is impractical,
I ask for colours that do not yet exist.
I keep trying to retroplay the forensics,
picking at the bones of the evidence
disaggregating the stones
and throwing off questions like spray from a fountain.
Then I try to tackle my ignorance mathematically
(while superimposing some geometric grid)
but the algebraic mystery
just keeps dividing itself by pi
and multiplying its possibilities by infinity.
I walk around the problem
like the circumambulation of the priesthood
struggling against the counterrotation of our cultures
and coming to a complete halt
up against the third-party intersection of the gods.
I examine the monuments to our own time
and deduce from them what must be our philosophy:
“get by, get ahead, get stuff, get more”.
I examine the monuments to that ancient race
and deduce from them what must be their philosophy:
“live in such a way that after you die
you will reunite with the divine”.
Enabled by the past and ennobled by history
the pyramids are a pedagogical tool for humankind,
a sort of distance education for the earth
employing their interdisciplinary curriculum
for the critical masses.
Through some miracle of tardiness
we are only beginning to mine the message now,
and in a marvellous juxtaposition of timeframes
the centuries have curved around like space
to meet before our startled eyes, right here and now.
Still, it’s an axiom in the marketplace
that someone will always undertake
the wholesale exploitation of every mystery.
If there were snow, there would be a chairlift
up the north side, and people renting skis
in a quaint little pyramid-shaped chalet;
others would be kayaking out across the delta
to climb the iceberg. However long the ice age,
and however hard I try,
I can’t quite scrape enough frost off the glass
to make out the mystery beneath.
However many metaphors I come up with
the pyramids are always one allegory further down the line,
spilling their sweet secrets into someone else’s ears.
Who that someone is we cannot know,
yet I have long desired to follow the builders
into whatever heaven they escaped to,
to ask them why they built, and who they are.
I feel, I know not how, that the pyramids’
asynchronous communication with our century
has something to do with explaining
the demographics of paradise.
The Egypt Poems (cont.)
By Linda Pearce
NO BALM
There is a dry wind blowing through my soul
a gusty wind, from the south of my heart,
with sand and grit that brings tears to my eyes.
It is this same wind that carried you away,
My Lord, tumbling over your own death
in your eagerness to be free.
The priests have made a ceremony of my heartbreak;
with holy gestures they have wrapped you up
in linen, with oils and spices and perfumes
they have placed the organs of my own reflection
into your canopic jars, and sealed me in.
I will no longer eat, because you cannot eat.
I will not rest because you sleep too long.
In my sleepless hours I contemplate marking the astrolabe
as though your new location could be fixed:
somewhere in those stars there is the star you have become,
but which it is, my burning will not tell.
In place of mummification I would have wished for
some more appropriate pyrotechnology
some blast furnace opportunity which would cremate
the pieces of your soul right here on earth
where I could catch the cinders, flying, in my net of grief
like the thousand birds that flutter in my mind.
Or else I wish they had embalmed me too.
My imagination takes me on your journey:
you will encounter Fear, My Lord, waiting
there by the roadside with his flail
just where the canyon narrows;
you may sing him your carnation melody
so that he may stand aside, and so
your heart remain as light as air.
Do not let your heart grow heavy with remembrance
lest the feather win the scales; I would
that you lose even your remembrance of me
so your heart remain as light as air.
In the spaces between my grief I indulge myself
in an observation of its aftereffects
and have come to wonder if perhaps
our souls are the wrong shape for this life;
perhaps we are not round enough, or
we have too many edges, or too few;
perhaps the enneagram, the template,
is in perpetual motion around some other planet.
Perhaps, My Lord, some cosmic mistake
cast us up together on this shore,
and tears us now apart. I cannot tell.
They are blowing the horns now, the priests,
incanting the magical rendition of your future life.
I have behaved badly;
they will no longer let me see your face
before they mask the marble of your brow
with the representation of your godhood,
all in gold.
I sit trembling in the anteroom.
I’m very cold, frozen by my spartan
dereliction of duty: I cannot carry your death
in your jar down the long steps to your tomb.
I know, I know not how,
they will not let you rest in peace
for men will come in times to come
and tumble down your grave
however grave we are the day it’s sealed.
I was your mathematical plaything, My Lord,
counting on you for everything
but now my griefs, my tears, are numberless;
day by day I am counting backwards down to nothing
where I shall remain. I cannot calculate your loss.
This morning I looked into my polished mirror
and was astonished to find no blood on myself;
my face and hands were clean, and yet
so freely have I bled I looked behind me
for the pool of red.
I fell at last through some reluctant sleep
into a dream where I saw you standing, alone,
sowing the seed of the sphinx into a fertile field.
You turned to look at me, your fingers
scattering the last of it. Then suddenly,
you sank into the earth,
as I screamed,
as tiny heads were breaking through the dirt.
I have behaved badly, like some classless freedomite,
making wild accusations and tearing at your breast
looking for your pulse, frantic, graceless.
I have disgraced my station, and for this excuse
I can only say
they have drawn from your body everything
that made it dear to me – your self, your brain, your life.
If I were worthy I could see your ba ascending
purified and free, but instead I tremble
for the journey that you take.
I will not follow you, My Lord, for when I die
my heavy heart will tell against me on the scales.
I shall be found wanting, and sink to I know not where
from which low place I may look up
through all my endless nights and see you shining in the sky.
And I may feel, like your fingers on my skin,
the firefly touch of the distant star.
I will rise up now
and carry my heart in your jar
down the long steps to our tomb.
************************************************
Fifty years we wasted on the desert floor,
lives spent on knees in supplicating haste,
used tools (caked with dust) that picked and dug.
We worked with hope, while boredom
made us rich with disappointment.
The mind wanders as it gouges in the dirt.
The drawings of the site are hardly worth
the rough papyrus that they’re sketched upon,
and in a trance the mind holds visions up
like golden masks.
The shadow of the pyramid draws lines,
takes sun from sky and glare from tired eyes.
The way we hunt for truth we’ll only find,
silent under sculpted stone,
the artefactual shards of the broken heart.
The Egypt Poems (cont.)
By Linda Pearce
THE FOUNTAINHEAD
They pick up the wooden crate full of numbers
and carry it down to the mathematician
who sits in the cellar
rearranging his own brain into pleasing patterns.
He’s always ordering new numbers
whenever his supply runs out,
although they cost him dear.
He wears an old coat that’s patched together
from the pieces of his theorems,
and he wears the proof around him like a scarf.
He’s cranky, being always up against infinity –
it seems to him unfair that God
should always have access to more numbers than he,
and he’s divided himself so many ways
he’s had to invent a whole new system of enumeration
just to keep track of his own fragments;
he writes them with a stick on clay,
and bakes himself in the sun.
A pile of unused vectors slides off the edge
of his clay tablet, and falls on the floor,
coincidentally forming a pyramid
travelling at the speed of light.
He contemplates this,
and falls into a state of rapture.
At times he’s called to work.
Measuring his forearm with a string
he walks himself around the site
mumbling to himself in fractions.
He peers nearsightedly at the huge blocks they sent
in their own determination to outdo God.
He opens his mind to a state of calculus,
using integrals to calculate the area under the sky,
subtracting the space occupied by all the air
and remembering to allow for the angle of the shadow
cast by the evergrowing temple.
He returns to his cool room
hot on the heels of a new obsession.
There are so many numbers in the background –
thousands, millions, trillions,
positive, negative, real and unreal!
And then there is the additive nature of numbers,
the way they seem to keep relentlessly accumulating,
piling up in corners, and then there are the sly imaginative numbers
that creep into his equations, wreaking havoc with reality.
He develops a theory that all these numbers may not be necessary,
that there are some which could be eliminated;
in this mad quest he begins to examine each one
looking for its qualities, examining its worth,
testing it between his teeth
dividing the numbers into piles – yes, no –
reinventing the binary system unawares.
He finds that his predisposition for threes
is skewing the purity of his project;
he cannot trust his own data.
Numbers swirl around his dreams like kites,
swaying the high currents of his mind.
So, the camel.
When you’re on the camel for very long
you taste the online realtime experiential flavor of reality;
the camel demands a high tolerance for feedback,
usually in the form of waves of pain.
Your pain, of course, has no effect on him.
Nor do you affect the anarchy of his aspirations.
Suppose that Egypt had been overtaken
by a greening of the energy field
which flowed across the sands;
through some kind of quick time application
all the land turns emerald.
The camel pauses to eat flowers and grass.
Nobody can get him moving.
His hump grows enormously.
He lays down in a field of poppies and burps.
His riders feel no urgency to reach the next oasis,
because it’s all oasis.
The camel has a sleep,
flowers bubbling from his gently snoring lips.
The rider unpacks the camel;
he needs a new form of transportation;
he starts to imagine the horse.
The camel awakes with a start
from a dream where he was being replaced
by a camel with no hump, where he was
being made redundant by the greening of the fields.
What would he do without the hot and freezing
blasting sculpted sands
that nothing else could cross?
He is a creature perfectly engineered
(implying what?) for his environment,
like the fish. He swims through the sands
like the shark.
And what of his rider? Since he cannot morph
(through some engineering oversight)
the rider is dependant upon the engineering
that created creatures well-designed
for the needs of man in a dry deserted land.
Why not just design the human
with the ability to morph, to create his own hump
and trudge across the desert by himself?
The camel makes a loud sound of disgust.
The desert flows back over the green fields.
The Egypt Poems (cont.)
By Linda Pearce
I MARK FOR YOU
I mark for you the benefits of death
for you who fear your timely end
I mark your meaning in this place
your place apparent as you deem it to be life.
You mark the benefits of life
the place you know
defaulting the thrust of the question
that follows you, intent, into the afterlife.
Misled by some internal justice
you are sure that your desserts
are still more life
but your body teaches otherwise.
I draw from you with iron hook your soul
so magnetized to earth it resonates, your soul,
and settles on its path to its true home.
You swing to your polarity
finished with the sway of life on earth.
I weigh your heart, Anubis standing by
I count your lies, enumerate your deeds
I read the book you wrote, I scan your soul
I mark for you the benefits of death
I lift my hand and mark upon the wall
the thing you know the thing you know by now
you always knew, the symbol for the benefits of death.
Waiting here for the scales to settle
the gods are lining up to greet you home:
sundered from themselves
earth torn from sky
Osiris torn by Set, yet
they’re whole here, in this waiting room
where Isis may assemble you, again.
I note for you your attachment to yourself:
until your heart shall ache for others’ pain
you shall not know, nor shall I mark for you,
the benefits of death.
The Egypt Poems (cont.)
By Linda Pearce
THE INTERPLAY
The sun shines ferociously on the heads of those in the desert.
This rider pauses to take a long drink from his flask,
and trickles the water over his head. In the sky
the vultures wheel, and the horizon trembles in the heat.
The rider is in search of his own temple which has disappeared
into the modern world, but which may reappear mysteriously
in this ancient place. Through the shimmer he can dimly make out
pillars, walls, then carvings, a lintel, a fallen door. At least
he won’t have to hack his way inside.
He dismounts, ties the reins to a huge stone fallen from the vault.
Some of the roof is still intact; as he moves inside his eyes adjust
to the dimmer light, and the blessed relief of the cooler air.
It has been centuries since he last entered this place,
the temple of his own soul, centuries
since he last encountered his muse by the wellhead.
When last he came there were no sands, no vultures,
no cellphones ringing under the vault. When last he came
he was not alone, but preceded by his priests, followed by his slaves,
and robed in the flesh of his own holiness.
He takes a few steps, and pauses, suddenly unsure
if the person he is now is not the temple he was then.
His modern mind keeps trying to rationalize the interplay
between his many lives.
The Egypt Poems (cont.)
By Linda Pearce
THE SCRIBE
I have written myself plainly, without deceit.
I have written the words of others on the long smooth scrolls
and rolled them up, and placed them into jars
and sealed the jars. And I know things that I should not know.
What I know makes nonsense of the ouija board.
I wrote apocalyptic predictions in the sand
and erased them with a thought.
I wrote the thoughts of others
and erased them with prophecies of death.
I filled my slate with symbols
of the renaissance of the overlord
and hid it in the cupboard with the linens.
They trusted me to map the resting place;
They walked me back and forth
to see the carvings on the walls,
the funerary ornaments, the furnitures,
the silent statues attending upon their master.
I copied the instructions of the architect.
I wrote the thoughts of my own heart,
then ate the scraps they were written on
lest they be read.
The few of us who write are powerful men
having the secrets of the written word
underneath our tongues.
I open the door to my mouth.
I bend over my page,
breathing the symbols of Mystery,
and confounding the obelisk
with things I should not know.
The Egypt Poems (cont.)
By Linda Pearce
SPHINX
Humming the low tones of the mantra of immortality
the Sphinx long years ago took up residence on the plateau of thought.
There is a risk in speechlessness,
but the Sphinx is literate only in the language of mystery,
and he avoids any pointless telecast of words.
Sanctified by silence, He takes his place
in the hagiography of another universe in another time.
In His mantra he has achieved optimal resonance,
but He’s tuned to galaxies beyond our sight.
Simulating immortality,
He breasted the waves during the long flood,
then watched grains of sand drift by like centuries,
tapped the pacemaker technology that beat time with the years.
The answer that the Sphinx enfolds
is orders of magnitude larger than
the question it is needful now to ask.
And yet, anaesthetized by the indifference of the dead,
He may never tell. He’s used to ignoring humankind
who pass away so soon. He has no world view:
what we cannot understand is the remoteness of the experiment.
Still, immobile as He seems,
the Sphinx plays many roles:
He is the mysterious physician,
doing surgery on our bloodiest beliefs;
He is the teacher of the mute,
giving us a higher education in the lessons of solitude.
His credentials are impeccable:
He is in Himself that spatial representation
derived from a dimensional overflow,
and bearing in its curves the meme for truth.
What does the Sphinx consume
apart from space and time?
He has no needs at all,
being empowered by the sandstorm,
and surviving solely through
His magnificent interchange with Himself.
Foretold by the drumroll of the desert sands,
He is most profoundly in Himself a community of one:
then where is the pride of lions from which he came?
Which worlds are graced by sphinxes like to ours?
Sustained by the eternal flame
that burns in the brazier of the sun,
He is the offspring of the molten technocrats,
confirming the autocracy of the dead –
and now He waits until their time returns.
Without the slightest movement
yet at the speed of light
He is lengthening the interphase;
time is captured close between His paws,
and with the hot wet sand beneath His weight,
He is incubating nothing less than the future itself.
THE PRIESTESS NOW, … AND THEN
Is there nowhere I can go to shut myself off
from my all too present self? Under a pyramid perhaps,
buried the shell self until the sand silt sky and stars
opened the ancient Egyptian stone
to find inside the bride I was before
wed to a spirituality I can hardly glimpse
in this life so far from home from stone
walked through the courtyard
with my anklets tinkling anklet ankle ankh
oh Greatest One my robes are white to recall Thy light
I put my hands over my face to make a sacrament of Your place
I burn this stick before you
in the smoke You will see the most of what I can be
I count for you:
unity duality relationship matter and love
all on one hand and the same on the other five rings
five chimes of the bell the stone slides back
I slide freeform into Your Oneness with the dark
the smell of eternity all around me with my shroud.
I smile out loud
and in the morning I arise I greet Your new sunrise sonrise
Your rays my face Your warmth my eyes Your heat my sighs
oh Greatest One Your land is dark when You are gone
when the darkness has eaten You we are hungry
I would eat You with the dark
but all my masters say this cannot be.
I am not free: I hunger for Your light
and none who hunger ever can be free
oh Greatest One I would climb into Your chariot
and ride with Thee across the heavens I would be
Thy horse Thy whip the concubine of God
I would cool Thy thirst and my own with the dew on the stone
we are alone
the silence here leaves me alone with You
the stone makes tracks across the sand
the sand makes tracks across the earth
Your shout in the morning moves
along the tracks from east to west
my shadow is Your substance
oh Greatest One I cast my shadow back before You
do with it as You will
dissolve and disassemble me oh Greatest One
for I am meant for Thee
and to Thee will return when day is done
I kneel in the dust that You have made
from the stones of eternity,
and I am not free.
The Egypt Poems (cont.)
By Linda Pearce
THE COVENANT
Unpacking the dream that swept its way down the Nile with the tide,
I decide all bets are off. What’s learned upon this plane
leaves West behind and always offers East,
leaves now behind and always seeks the past.
We have lost the infallible ability to recognize truth and falsehood;
we are desperate to hide in our own shadows;
in our eagerness to pour out pain we spill the afterlife,
and down the drain goes all hope of understanding who we were.
I say “we” advisedly, wondering if the ancients,
those from Egypt, from Sumeria, from Atlantis,
were people like us at all? Were they the same species,
even? Somewhere on the borderline they crossed
their cross of matter, walked their lives,
inked their secrets onto flesh,
and dissolved into the past.
Is it necessary to be Egyptian, Sumerian, Atlantean
to understand at all?
Our affinity to their mystery is like
the firefly’s partiality to the moon,
our likeness so faint and our goal so remote –
and yet the spark is there within us still.
We could experiment with a rewrite of the covenant
that once linked God to Man and gods to men,
make whole new deals with Set,
strike bargains with Osiris for our souls,
pledge ba and ka for our good behavior,
set the feather on the scale
and hope for the best.
Or do we already have a new deal with the gods?
On this night of the solstice, the full moon, the apogee
and a bright clear sky (all concurrent, strange as it may seem)
the new covenant is mapping its way along the grid of opportunity,
and each square holds a symbol of Their commitment to our cause.
So clear the moon, it’s bright enough
to read the strange new words;
bending down (with some acquired grace)
I sign my name in full.
The Egypt Poems (cont.)
By Linda Pearce
SPOTTING THE DOVETAIL
Egypt forgets herself when she lies under the body of the sky
under the body of the universe she lies
her head and feet and heart aligned
with her own temples, and with all the stars.
From this great height I look down her sloping breast
I see her arteries her heart her beautiful face
from this high place. Atop my own creation
I see the land for which we built this,
the greatest of our pyramids.
We are building from our own substance
we are the bricks, the building blocks:
you cannot lay a knife between us
for we were created as a perfect fit.
We are made for building:
this is our heavenly foreplay
wherein we hope to awaken
the ecstasy of the afterlife
by touching the soil here, and here,
with the delicacy of a lover
leaving monuments to creation on her skin.
Our temples are instilled with the lustre of love
and carry the full meaning of our devotion to the All.
Egypt is the land of twelve as we are twelve
as all the universe is twelve:
we see that there is meaning in everything
that our earthly life is mapped to greater things
that we arise out of the great Matrix
and to it shall return.
We are the flowering of the starseed.
I remember the long distant past
I recall the age of Leo in the sphinx.
In spite of speed’s refraction in time
I count the centuries from the beginning
knowing while I count that there is no beginning
and that our practical magic arose with us
and harmonized its way into the stone with which we build.
The sound of magic is the magic itself;
in all the uni-verse, the one-word,
the harmonic interplay of voice
is all that is required to build a world.
With sound we cut, we shift, we place
in such a way that leaves the sound
resounding in the stone for just so long
as it shall stand. In times to come
men shall not understand their strange response,
their reverberation to our practical magic,
the top of which I stand upon this day.
I see from here the rush the river the silt the soil
the fusion of the body parts into this image of the Whole.
Far below by the sacred river
the men and women are fertilizing the navel of this land,
birthing once again the unity of perfection.
They fish they plant they sow;
they worship as they fish they plant they sow,
for all their actions are the mirror
of the actions in the sky performed by gods
perfected in the doing, and in the being they demand.
These babes and children, women and men I see
are the mass migration of soul essence
into the material, onto our sacred land.
They are animating the endzone, full of life,
looking through the marvellous apertures of themselves
back to where they came, the living Source.
There are many things I know that you do not
and many things you know that I do not;
let us fill in each other’s gaps
let us not be strange and solitary and only half-informed
do not withhold your half of what we know
for Egypt needs the total of our sum.
This is no time for us to become individuals.
We are all the head, the heart and the hands
of Her body on the earth, of Her temple in the stars.
Yup, I’m going to Egypt
packed up all my ideas in a big zip bag
left my preconceptions by the door
booked passage with the ancients
and read a book that told me all I need to know.
Going to be mysterious, I am,
mystical in strangely inappropriate places,
like a Sphinx in the armory.
Going to open the latch-gate of experience,
wander in, stand amazed,
swing on the gate for a while.
Going to commune with the past
eat legends with my lunch
follow old all the way back to ancient
get lost somewhere in the time-scale
reimagine how it used to be.
Going to take the old sarcophabus
down the Giza highway
smell the stink of cars
get irritated, wish I was home
and then fall into a hieroglyphic reverie
and wish I never had to leave.
Going to inhale the past
from the air by the side of the Nile,
and puff it out into the future.
Yup, I’m going to Egypt
All poems copyright 2008 by Linda Pearce