Shams' Muse

Jacob said to me, "Rid yourselves of the alien gods," and we cried and we wept for them.

where he left off in so many ways a double.

Genesis 34.1-31 What violence to you, Shechem, in your own bed, slaughtered and tricked, the blood still running fresh between your legs. A bride price indeed, worth a nation of men, was she not, the dark eyed Dinah, who you fell upon in the fields beside a well. Corpses lay across one another entwined, contorted and screaming, the blood still running fresh between their legs, still running even after death in growing pools that the rain beat back to the dust. My shame, to my shame a genocide for a woman raped, a woman seized by harpy fingers, jewels thick on the knuckles that bit into her skin and welted red as she wept home in ripped dress, blood running down her leg, scratched by brambles, by thorns, dirtied and stinking from violation. Though Jacob shook, heads bowed, the old yield to the young, as this is no country for old men. Jacob slept and dreamed of his new cattle, his new people and the land shared between them. While he slept, swords in hand, Jacob's sons took your lif...

Genesis 29.9-20 "And when Jacob saw Rachel, daughter of his uncle Laban, and the flock of his uncle Laban, Jacob went up and rolled the stone off the mouth of the well, and watered the flock of his uncle Laban. Then Jacob kissed Rachel and broke into tears... So Jacob served seven years for Rachel and they seemed to him but a few days because of his love for her." Tending sheep is not such hard work, lead them to graze and keep watch against wolves and birds of prey, birth them, and shear them. The only troubles are neighbors. Sometimes they steel your sheep, sometimes you theirs. That is the way of things in the land of Haran. Day in day out, arguing over sheep, voices rising over tinkling bells and the songs of birds that bathe in the dust beside the well. Singing songs of my family, cresting the hills with the flocks, with a dog. So my days go. Rachel, she comes to me with cheese and bread. Rachel, she comes to me, we lie in the fields and look up into the heavens, and sev...

Favorite Places in Montreal #1 Castro VC is incessant in this city receding into the brick from the shouts of schoolyard children, surfacing on the cement of an overpass, only to porpoise beneath a poster for Jean Le Loup’s two night stand at Club Soda. The tags of the city are Sirens I walk past them huddled in doorways, seizing the long strands of my hair, ivying their arrows around my ankles. He took me to the secret place beneath the highway, mattresses pushed against the pillars and piles of rags, empty cans of spray paint and names upon names. Generations of names. I learned the tags like I learned the constellations, So the stars would not be a disorganized scatter across the sky. Each one now a story, a myth. I came back and sat on the cement blocks, sat and waited, sat and sat. This desolate patch grew flowers, lived but a few days and I was the only one to see the blooms. (This is in response to a HomeRun challenge to write a poem about one's favorite place in Montreal....

"Lot, who went with Abram, also had flocks and herds and tents, so that the land could not support them staying together; for their possessions were so great that they could not remain together. And there was quarreling between the herdsmen of Abram's cattle and those of Lot's cattle. -- The Canaanites and Perizzites were then dwelling in the land. -- Abram said to Lot, 'Let there be no strife between you and me, between my herdsmen and yours, for we are kinsmen. Is not the whole land before you? Let us separate: if you go north, I will go south; and if you go south, I will go north'" Genesis 13.5-9 Brotherly love, a guise for brotherly hate, No love lost between, No generosity of two, of duos, in this hateful, hot land, between tents. The wiser brother struck first, an act of deceptive acquiescence, with gold bracelets tattooed to his wrist and arms, his stomach thrust before him, grown fat and round with meals of wine and meals of meats, his shepherd's c...

not so good, not so bad, days like this I should be glad even if no named affection, I am certain of this direction.

Genesis 21.7 "Who would have said to Abraham, That Sarah would suckle chldren! Yet i have borne a son in his old age." Sarah laughed, as she sometimes did, at such a silly proposition. Far less that she should have a son than that her husband, now shriveled and old, should be able to rise to this occasion, even less he should make an emission that could hit an internal star. No, now his bones that poked through in places in jagged ridges dry and brown with sun. His flesh hung from his shoulders, pulled down to the ground in paper thin rolls that pooled in the belly and over his hips All hung down, lower than in youth, lower than in his prime, low as though crying out to return to the dust from whence it came. Sarah could only laugh that this shuffle footed man with Arabic black eyes and white brows that met his white beard, that stood on the roadway, cane in hand, forgetting he had taken three steps before and three more to go, would feel the sap of spring and rise like the...

The April poetry project is taking a religious bent. I want to read the Tanakh (aka, the Old Testament or the Hebrew Bible) and write a poem a day inspired by this work of poetry-law-history. It is pretty fascinating stuff and I am rather surprised by what is in there sometimes. Take the brief story of Babel that I read yesterday. I'd always thought the story was about hubris, but when I read it this time, I was rather surprised by the fact that God was just afraid. Weird. People were harmonized, in cooperation, and he was worried about what they could accomplish. There's a Smith's song that goes, "If you think peace is a common goal, that goes to show how little you know." Anyway, always a good read, and I think a series of mediocre poems are a very fine way to process the text.

What a raw deal for those men in Babel. To have aimed for the stars and as one built a brick tower so high, it frightened the Lord. The Lord confounded their speech. He scattered them. The tower was unbuilt on the land, a blight, an eyesore, massive and semi soft, impotent to its majesty. All who passed it said, "Men who aim too high fail," which is not the truth. Men did not fail, but there were other forces at work, the same forces that have brought down many a man and reduced him to a mere shadow\ of his former self. This is the doing of the Lord, who knew that harmony would make people slack and lazy. I can not believe he did not like peace.