by Egon Lass

Created on: April 29, 2009

ARCHAEOLOGICAL FIND

Where Mount Zion fills a void of light

Hadj Gassem, descended from the late king,

Tunnels in darkness to seek invisible

Arrows that fly from history's bow,

Piercing the targets of forgetfulness.

An Abraham

Who holds the sleeping candle.

Archaeological distance

Cannot hide from him the pillared sentence,

Nor rack him

To the umbilical chord of doubt.

Does he know

That he has found his fourteenth body,

Left on the borders of an ancient century

Where incarnations lie in wait for being?

Crushed skull in the rockpool womb.

The Hadj stentorian

Has lifted his own former face

To gaze into the absence of his eyes.

So will our future selves,

Crashing through some distant door of life,

Discover their present bodies,

The appled flesh in bloom upon the tree,

The left bones waiting petrified

Under the rubble.

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