I wrote this for Eisheth Zenunim.

 

 

Death is as red as a rose.

She wears a cloak of flame.

She holds a poisoned sword.

 

Life clings to her,

Like an infant hugging her neck.

She cradles him

And sings him to sleep.

 

She is called a “harlot”

Because she comes for us all,

And all of us must pay her price.

 

She is the Devil’s bride,

The Queen of Queens—

And she sits beside the lonely beggar,

Stroking his cheek.

 

We are all the issue of her womb,

And every one of us will be swallowed by her maw.

 

My mother is drunk on the blood of saints.

Even the chaste faint away at her kiss.

She is Mystery, Babalon—

Abominations are her best-loved children.

 

My mother is adorned with many jewels,

With tattered silk, and tarnished ornaments of gold,

The moldering, worm-eaten finery of the grave.

Her many heavy rings

Slipped off of rotting hands.

 

My mother is voluptuous, feasting on flesh,

And fecund with all the small crawling things

To which death gives life.

 

Her hair, as cool and dark as earth,

Teams with maggots, twines with worms.

The serpent encircles her throat.

 

My mother always weeps but always smiles.

She kisses the sores of lepers, the boils of plague.

Because of her, nobody dies alone.

 

My mother bears the scythe,

Her fingers worn to bone from wielding it.

 

And she is called the End of Flesh,

And the End of All Days;

For lo! she reaps the pure and the impure,

Weaving all into her vesture of flame.

 

Mother, be thou adored!

2.

 

I burn to you myrrh, and Egyptian musk.

I kneel trembling before your altar,

Daubed with ash,

Anointed with tears.

 

(“Let the salt of earth admonish the waters

That they may bear the virtue of the great sea.”)

 

To no-one save you do I kneel,

But you bring all to their knees.

 

You came to me heavily pregnant with a dead star,

And reeking of eternity.

Your icy touch could cool any fever.

 

In the red book on your altar you bade me write,

To take dictation.

And you whispered then:

 

I am the place

Where all things die

But are perfected.

I am the great opening and the breaking waves.

Believe in me. Be brave.

 

I rubbed my head, that hurt from the smoke,

And looked at what I had written.

 

To be is to burn.

What rots returns.

 

“I don’t understand” I said.

I don’t understand either,

You replied, and furthermore added:

Anything you can control is soon lost.

 

“So what are we to do, mother?”

 

Celebrate, you said,

With your smile like a blade.

Celebrate.

 

I closed the book, and rarely looked at it again.

 

3.

 

O Mother, there is no one you do not love,

And no-one who does not hate your name!

 

You embrace all,

But we flee from you in fear!

 

Yet you are everywhere.

 

Reviled, despised,

You sit by the crossroads

And quietly greet the unwary traveler.

 

You whispered in Caesar’s ear— “Remember, you must die,”

And it was you who sharpened the knives of the Ides.

Your teeth glinted like the guillotine.

 

Your arms have plunged to the elbows in the entrails of murder.

You are stooped and withered with age,

And fleshy as the lethal excesses of youth.

 

You are the burning bodies,

And the ravens of dispersion,

And the veiled ones in their shrouds—

And the crown cut in two,

O Thaumiel.

 

You are twisted metal by the highway,

Mushroom clouds and screams of the bereaved.

War and pestilence and famine

Are yours, O Lady Death,

And caskets lined in satin,

And funeral bouquets.

All savagery is yours,

And all touching kindness.

 

 

4.

 

Sometimes I want to come back.

To return to you.

Then you hold me at arm’s length,

Your whisper, cobweb-soft:

Not yet.

And then I hate you ever more.

 

Bitch!

You can be so alluring.

They say you are peace.

They say you are the end of pain.

Sometimes the noose beckons with its embrace,

The gun muzzle with its kiss.

You tease!

As if I ever could surprise you!

 

None but you can know the time or place.

Yours alone is to spin the thread,

To measure the thread,

To cut the thread,

O Queen of Swords

And scythes

And scissors.

 

I’ll see you soon,

You say.

Don’t be too much in love with me yet.

 

5.

 

O Bloody mother of plagues and revolutions,

You are exactly as kind as you are cruel.

You stroke the fur and feathers of small stiff creatures,

Weeping over their little bodies,

With the same tenderness you grant

To even the vilest and most criminal,

Men whose gore-glutted souls loved profit and war.

Jehovah himself will taste the venom of your blade.

 

I do not know whether you are the first thing

Or the second thing

Or the last thing

Or the only thing.

Because of you, they say,

The Throne of Glory collapsed.

Because of you, the fall…

Or are you the fall,

Or the place we fall into?

 

You were the serpent,

Or the fruit,

Or perhaps, even the tree.

 

You are the wheels coming off the flaming chariot,

The wheels within the wheels spinning out of time,

O Thunder, perfect mind,

Continuous one of heaven,

Let it be ever thus

That men speak not of thee at all,

O solve and coagula

O dies irae dies illa

Forever and ever amen!

 

In the end, there will be only you and the Devil—

Death and Chaos, you are the only facts,

In love with each other for all eternity.

 

6.

 

Forgive me, Mother, for shunning you,

Who shun no-one;

You who never flinch

And are always so very punctual.

It is only because I know

That I will be with you so soon.

I linger in the twilight.

I still want to play, mother.

Do not call me home!

 

So many of my friends have gone to you already.

But I am not ready to join you at the wedding feast.

 

Do not call me home!

 

Mother, you take everything from me!

And I will give you all.

In my final hour I will stand before you, naked and destitute,

With nothing left to me, perhaps not even a memory,

Except for your cold touch.

 

I was in your womb before I was born.

In the vast cosmic ocean of darkness and light.

Before I was anything, I knew you,

And when I am nothing, I will know you again.

 

Mother, embrace me not before my time!..