Flies swarm an ass’s head
selling for thirty pieces of silver in Samaria. Its eyes stare blankly upward as whispered voices in the wind are heard: When will this famine end? Desert truths lie threadbare on the loom for moths to eat, their abandoned skins shed like old garments. Wretches satisfy hunger grinding stone into lepers’ bread. Sandy tombstones testify against those who consume the ripe wheat, spreading chaff over the cremains of the poor. In the shroud of authority priests shake cinder dust from their feet. Then a message out of Gilead! To Ahab, King of Israel, from the mad Tishbite: You reposed trust in a priesthood sown with sterile seed and tithed Zarepheth’s oil in God’s name. The clouds shall hide their faces in spite because you acknowledged not your shame. Two measures of barley sold for a shekel in Samaria’s gate. Who dares dissent from lords that cause Jordan to run dry and slake thirst with water drawn from the Dead Sea? Who will enter their bathhouses filled with fresh figs and call them to repent? Where are the seven thousand prophets who have not practiced priestcraft, their mouths pure of mammon’s wine, who are fed with manna carried in ravens’ beak? O Nineveh! See how high the hedge has grown round the shining crematorium on the hill radiating a form of godliness, a scorpion’s kiss. We are drunkards who think themselves sober still. How did it come to this? A graveyard for Abraham’s children cut from angels’ tongue, we craft coffins for God’s mysteries. No more hobby horses of fire! No more chariots rising up on eagle’s wings! We walk single file toward Assyria in mass lobotomy of all that transpired prior to Nineteen Seventy. Murmurs heard from Samaria’s wall: Boil thy son so we may eat. And so has the great and dreadful day come at last Elijah? Will you return to pour twelve barrels of water onto this barrenness? Will faith be made new by rolling waters that gush from the rock altar of our heart and spill forth holy fire to crush the desert snake opening to swallow our agency (or do they not know water runs until dammed at the end of the row)? His body claimed by the whirlwind. What did he hear in the still small voice? Listen at the end of the world to the oven speak its final word aflame the stubble and forbidden fruit. Shout it among the wicked, Ahaziah: your father left neither branch nor root! Do not worry: the dead do not murmur heaven’s secrets. Elijah is gone. His mantle has fallen to the ground and someone must pick it up and bear it anew to Carmel’s mount. Will you? |