THE LION-HEADED GODDESS OF WAR

Sekhmet, the Lion-headed Goddess of War

He was the sort of man
who wouldn’t hurt a fly.
Many flies are now alive
while he is not.
He was not my patron.
He preferred full granaries, I battle.
My roar meant slaughter.
Yet here we are together
in the same museum.
That’s not what I see, though, the fitful
crowds of staring children
learning the lesson of multi-
cultural obliteration, sic transit
and so on.

I see the temple where I was born
or built, where I held power.
I see the desert beyond,
where the hot conical tombs, that look
from a distance, frankly, like dunces’ hats,
hide my jokes: the dried-out flesh
and bones, the wooden boats
in which the dead sail endlessly
in no direction.

What did you expect from gods
with animal heads?
Though come to think of it
the ones made later, who were fully human
were not such good news either.
Favour me and give me riches,
destroy my enemies.
That seems to be the gist.
Oh yes: And save me from death.
In return we’re given blood
and bread, flowers and prayer,
and lip service.

Maybe there’s something in all of this
I missed. But if it’s selfless
love you’re looking for,
you’ve got the wrong goddess.

I just sit where I’m put, composed
of stone and wishful thinking:
that the deity who kills for pleasure
will also heal,
that in the midst of your nightmare,
the final one, a kind lion
will come with bandages in her mouth
and the soft body of a woman,
and lick you clean of fever,
and pick your soul up gently by the nape of the neck
and caress you into darkness and paradise.

Margaret Atwood

What do they look like to one another, then?

“How can it be?” she wondered.

“I suppose I could understand it if men had simply forgotten unicorns or if they had changed so that they hated all unicorns now and tried to kill them when they see them.
But not to see them at all, to look at them and see something else- what do they look like to one another, then?
What do trees look like to them, or houses, or real horses, or their own children?”

Sometimes she thought, “If men no longer know what they are looking at, there may well be unicorns in the world yet, unknown and glad of it.”
But she knew beyond both hope and vanity that men had changed and the world with them, because the unicorns were gone.
Yet she went along the hard road, although each day she wished a little more she had never left her forest.

fail me not, jungle lungs

we are on the precipice.
my words are never enough
but if i surrender them
perhaps they’ll breathe the
same thick, hot air i suck in.
perhaps if i leave them
alone, their hollow forms
will expand beyond my
constricted heart, which beats at
a volume for lupine ears.
the bird inside my chest
drums inside its tiny breast.
he is only able to lift his head,
for his wings have surrendered
to words. o words, fail us not,
fill your sail with my soul and
take from me what i give wrongly to
many unworthy of exaltation.

‘there’s a bend in my beak’
can you hear its little words
in the wind, willed into the world
on the wings of an impartial gust?

do these words dare to
undermine gifts i saved
to pour upon my paramour?
she, the paramount
Holds eros inside
and grants no rest unless
in surrender.

Shall i build you a monument
for the deeds you’ve done
Or shall i cast off my letters
and try at being a person
In love and not in love?

quietly in the morrow
these words will march on.
now at once we know
the same disparity.