A woman dripping sticky with boba balls emerges from the purple slush that is the soup of life.
Cockroaches slide out from between her toes and nooks, fluttering as she stands.
Arms open and bent as if to welcome her blind grandchild gone too long.
She smells like chilli and tastes like a final kiss
Vape smoke and light falls out from her mouth and her eyes flick back.
She is the woman lore, nameless yet fixed.
She is our messenger.
‘Raise what is left of humanity and balance the trick of time
A rush, a rest.
Deliver higher in the pursuit of evolving consciousness
Strong of heart
and whatever it is that swells in the bellies of those that carry on.’
GENESIS :: Etemenanki
Her villagers journeyed from the east to the Western Greens
They said to one another, ‘let us collect bush sticks and clay’
And they found twigs for stacking and mud for flaming
Catch if you can, the moment the villagers begun to build
in the plateau, jealous of the widespread birds.
They asked Her, ‘what are our arms for if not for soaring?’
Arrogance of flesh forgot what it is to run, what it is to die for land.
They whispered as she slept, ‘we will take you to the clouds of heaven’
Shared stories are the enemy of deception
The Baroste people tell tales of men who used
masts to reach their creator NYAMBE who had
fled to heaven
on a spider web. Like Babel,
The masts came down.
What does our God fear?
The villagers looked up from the long shadows, days spent in the dark and dust
to where the sun hit, at the height of their production.
When they had dug the earth of all its clay,
they swapped cake mix for flames
and counted the sticks laid.
Sweat, judgment of the villagers who worked
and the anointment of those who thirst.
Frenzied construction, stirring temptation
impatient hands, directionless fury the cocaine high of progress
just ask the children of the industrial revolution
or an influencer post bikini shot
quicker now for glamour of a panorama
All this mystical hoo-haa!
A tower to add to a deck
It was the children of the villagers that wrote that tarot card
the story of what precedes death in the major arcana
The midnight psychics moan at the moon
as they morph their bodies into a cobra
And tell of the chaos
that such a card unveils
The demolition of falsities
and blows that reveal the dryness of the bricks you have laid
The purple slush boils and the nostrils of the woman
flare across her blue cheeks leaking tornados
She cries creeks for the villagers
their mud cakes, the ripped roots and hollowed soil.
‘How staunch is the empire?
Will it stand against a compounding deficit
Will it fall to a world warming by 4 degrees’
burning eucalypts
Cities hidden in smoke
Will it bleed at every leadership spill,
every coward hand shake
every failure of democracy.
To see your work undone is one thing
Though towers do not simply fade.
Spectacular hopes have spectacular
falls
and what about the infiniteness of the horizon?
‘Reimagine with the rubble and give thanks for the fall
Reconstruct windows for listening
and keep open your ears for the winds laden
with yesterday’s wisdom
Hang mirrors to pause,
Build seats for reflection’