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Ishtar (who brought us life)
was also a goddess of death –
calling out a cloud of little sperm
meant only to last a breath:
One tacky exhalation
into the warm unknown,
a base poured into acid where-
from none will clamor home,
And one, perhaps (the “lucky” best)
will feel his head concave,
and lose
his transient spirit-self
in a melt of DNA
And
break and split and chamber-clench
through
a sister cell – a savior,
but
too a catalytic harbinger
for a
stifling graveyard. Failure:
In a
sea of the dead, the paralyzed
(where
an egg absorbs and grows),
the
body flushes a thousand futures,
forgetting
all each knows
for
the blood of a bent-spined kidney bean.
a
tadpole. a wolf. a whale.
A
cabled, shape-shifting parasite –
a lush
in a liquid jail.
So
what are you really, goddess,
seeing
over this kicking confection
that
was sparked by a death
and by
shedding deaths, grew?
You muse of resurrection.
:)
Happy Easter / pagan Ishtar goddess of fertility day. For the bunnies and eggs, lest they forget to appreciate the fermenting excess that we are all nestled in – 31 March 2013
ReplyDelete* Thanks Audrey (dinner table), Sara (contraception girl, with a coitus smile), Julie H. (Easter eggs), James (three children in the ether), Julie P. (three rabbits on a cake), & Laura (wedding flowers) for making this collage full.
I really like the poem, especially with the juxtaposition of the collage. I find it extremely interesting how you chose to write on a stereotypically blissful topic, Easter, with a much darker and truer tone. The initial set up provides that the poem will contain a more solemn outlook on the holiday and the pagan goddess Ishtar, but what I found most enjoyable was the shift from a declarative statement in the beginning and middle to an inquisitive one at the end, questioning both the impetuousness and cruelty of a praised being. The smiley face emoticon at the end was especially fitting, adding a slightly less serious and happier light to a heavy and profound poem. I was wondering though what the lines: "Failure: In a sea of the dead, the paralyzed (where an egg absorbs and grows), the body flushes a thousand futures, forgetting all each knows" mean to you. To me, they are representative of the futility of the human existence and the pagan Ishtar's dichotomy: both the fact that she is the goddess of fertility and consequently new life, but also that she is the muse of resurrection, thereby implicitly stating that she also plays a heavy role in death as well. One final thing I did enjoy most about the poem was the fact of the separation but also assimilation of failure and death, whereby coupling the two you made them distinct events which I believe is a very comedic commentary on the melodrama of human life. All in all, I love the poem and appreciate the subtle but important connection between the brightly colored collage and the much darker poem.
ReplyDeleteYou think a lot (that makes things seem darker than they are).
DeleteI get dizzy reading your words: "the fact of the separation but also assimilation of failure and death, whereby coupling the two you made them distinct events which I believe is a very comedic commentary on the melodrama of human life" ... Iiiii ... I didn't mean this to be dark - true, balanced out, but not dark.
The blend I was aiming for was not of life and death, but of the original Easter (after Ishtar - Babylonian/Assyrian goddess of fertility, war, love ... primarily associated with sexuality) and the Christian co-option of that holiday (which kept the pagan fertility symbols - eggs, rabbits - but tried to play them off as somehow related to Jesus's resurrection & new life).
So I'm like "Okay, I'll play the game: let's see how we can frame every birth as a resurrection." And that's where the old every-sperm-is-sacred / pro-lifers-should-call-ejaculation-murder argument came into play. Every birth is surrounded by millions of would-be lives collapsing almost as soon as they begin: the inherent mechanics of sexual reproduction.
That's the line you're asking about >> "Failure: In a sea of the dead, the paralyzed (where an egg absorbs and grows), the body flushes a thousand futures, forgetting all each knows" << a fertilized egg roiling to fruition in a uterus clouded with 255 million (that's the median sperm-count per ejaculation - wikipedia 2013) fellow travelers, slowly running out of battery life and seizing up and dissolving into the acid.
I don't think that's sad, really, just natural. And it DOES sort of make fertility into an act of resurrection (we are all literally "rising from the dead"). I'M SO CLEVER!!! HaHA
That's what the smiley-face meant ;)
This poem is such a fascinating approach to the meaning of a holiday that I rarely think about in a deeper manner. I love the comparison between the goddess of fertility, Ishtar, and the Pagan roots of Easter. The holiday is a celebration of the new life that comes out of the darkness and death of winter, and the description of an egg being fertilized is a perfect comparison to this phenomena. It is fascinating that there can be such immense rebirth after months of little life. Similarly, it is astounding that it is only after of the death of thousands of sex cells that life can be created. In the fourth stanza you relate the dead sperm in the woman’s body to a graveyard of failures, an image that reveals the bleak beginnings that all life comes from, something which goes unnoticed when life is actually created. The fifth stanza describes the moments when fertilization does not happen and the the fact that “the body flushes a thousand futures, / forgetting all each knows” displays the profound idea that there could have been so many different creatures on this earth if a single sperm had successfully fertilized a different egg. Nature is a powerful force that does not make conscious choices, and the line “forgetting all each knows” emphasizes that the events of the present happen completely by chance without Nature’s care. In the last stanza, Ishtar, the goddess of fertility, war, sex, and love, is brought up again and the tone takes on a lighter, more humorous tone. She is a being of both life and death, and it is this contrast that makes the natural world such a complex and mysterious thing.
ReplyDeleteYep. I would agree, with a little clarification to the natural world being "such a complex and mysterious thing" -- it's Morally complex & mysterious: what happens in the cycles of life is pretty well-known (we eat, we live, we're eaten, we fuel life); what that says about the natural definitions of justice and purpose and beauty ... not so simple.
Delete