Re Main

We who are alone and godless
Enlist your aid.
We beg of you,
groaning, moaning, mourning,
To send your troops:
Hail Osiris!

Flying past, chariot aflame,

guiding Halley’s comet!

Beg Him turn course

crossing the eons of moral decay

Commandeering His charging troops – storms for neo-astronomers.

If this alliance be too weak
Fear not
to call upon Marduk
Help us, oh, ye gods,
Enlil, Ea, Yahweh,
Utnapishtim!

Like the carcass of a gangrene-ridden jackal

we decay, slowly, agonizingly,
needlessly.

Re light Sheol!

Re warm Sheol!

Dry our musty, damp, Sheol!

Slay Leviathan, Marduk!

Oh, Atlas,

falter not.

The gods are our source;

soon shalt thou be nourished,
and the dead heap that crushes your back,
tears at your muscles,
rips sinewy slime
through sweaty pores,
shall revive,
the foul poison ebbing,
like flood waters,
and shall be transformed,
into Utnapishtim!

Re make haste,

our need thickens like pudding,
our fate —
manifest by our own self-deception —
crumbles like a pillar of salt.

And we cannot —
because we are alone? —

discover the ingredient,
nor the measure of aid,
which will remake our fate
to fuse in conjugal mixture
with our need.

And in health, we remain in sickness!

— Circa 1971