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Four Poems, by Charlotte Hussey

7/1/2021

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Picture
Venus of Laussel Bas-Relief, by Unknown Carver (Paleolithic France) 27, 000 to 23,000 BCE. photo 120, CC BY 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons

Venus of Laussel

A flint chisel scratched
your bas-relief into a sandy
block, an art your carver
learned from bears clawing
their territorial marks on the clay
walls of their cave, their lair.
 
The higher their mark, the greater
their brute size and power.
Your standing was even higher
where you once presided,
painted with ochre, on a ledge
over a rock shelter.
 
Alas, you have fallen
into the rubble: scrapers, spear
points, bone pendants,
pierced reindeer teeth.
You lie on your back,
survivor of some 26,000 years.
 
Unreadable, your featureless face,
ruined by rain, snow,
earthquake or enemies?
Divine face hard to imagine,
details too frightening to carve?
Tresses netted or free?
 
No doubt about your breasts,
they drop pear-shaped and full,
even if pitted and old, so old
time was just invented,
slashed into the bison horn
you, our first teacher, hold.
 
Its 13 downward strokes
cut with skillful intent
declare our lunar lessons:
moon, month, matrix,
mater, meter, measure,
mealtime, mother unmeasurable.
 
Your gaze towards its crescent
pulls us into its seasons,
its stories of your 13 moon
migration, trekking after
the reindeer, the caribou, the passing
herds of dappled horses.
 
Your belly swells out
of a swell in the soft rock.
Your bulging haunches, lumpy
with muscle and fat, cushion
your desires from the tongues
of glaciers slipping into your valleys.
 
Your vulva slopes deep
into rock, hiding its generous
lips, until a spear-thrower
returns from the bison rut
with its hump-shouldered
males. Females arch backs
 
raise tails. Their heads
strain upwards, open
mouthed. He enters between
the sculpted pillars of your legs.
They dwindle like the moon,
thin shins, tiny
feet, bear
skin shoes?

Picture
Nebuchadnezzar I’s Kudurru (Boundary Stone), by Unknown Carver (Babylon) 12 Century BCE. Theophilus Goldridge Pinches M.R.A.S. (1856 – 6 June 1934 Muswell Hill, London), Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

The Drunken Serpent

Demons swallow the moon.
I board a bobbing boat,
no safe anchorage in the reeds,
no longer of this summer land.
Bass drums calmly roll
to ease my heart. A sistrum
shakes to my sisters’ cries.
 
Their lamentations ring
and fade over the waves,
water none can drink,
none quench their thirst
destined for the Nether World
of broken forms and dust,
dust where the heads of departed
kings roll. Their eyes
dry. Their sandals broken.
 
Three Days. Three nights,
I lie belly down
in a cold, rocky cavern.
My eyes grow milky.
I rub against a boulder,
mouth, blunt nose.
My dry skin rips.
 
I slip from my worn shroud,
sluffing it off like a curse.
My tail whips up a storm,
softening the hard crust
of the earth. I burst forth
a willing green shoot.
I thunder up, twisting
my trunk, a vine promising
luscious clusters of fruit.
 
I send shivers through flesh.
I side-wind over shrines
where vengeful protectors guard
Nebuchchadnezza’s lands.
 
I look down on a broad
backed tortoise, a monstrous
island waiting in the marsh,
in the muddy shallows to bite
the ankle of an enemy scout.
 
I climb to stout Gula.
She sits on her brick shrine,
as if it were but a stool.
Her dog pricks his ears.
Her gold bracelets ring.
She claps, claps cursing
raiding parties with earth-
quakes, storms, and failed seed.
 
Summoned by an ox-skinned
drum, her scorpion man
crawls from war rubble.
He plants his two spurred,
spiny feet, nocks
his unforgiving arrow, bends
his stiff bow. His beard
hangs heavy and black.
The rim of his high fez
rests just above his aiming
eye. Its glance brings death.
 
I ascend above 3 domed
shrines, where the old gods,
drowsy with desert heat,
nap on their cedar-perfumed
mountain. They wait behind
bolted doors studded
with copper and gold, wait
for those brave enough
to meet them in the highest places.
 
Thirst drives me skywards
to drink from the moon’s crescent.
It overflows with a honey-wine
distilled at twilight by Venus
and the Sun, rain water,
bee’s honey and their grapes,
this pale gold nectar.
 
I imbibe deep to the lees,
satisfying my immortal needs.
Tears of joy, of sadness
streak down my cheeks.
Dewy spittle sparkles
on my lips. I float with the moon,
shepherding its herd of wooly clouds
and fat-sided stars,
eastward over the steppes of Eurasia.

Picture
Disk of Enheduanna, by Unknown Carver (Sumeria) 23rd Century BCE. Zunkir, CC BY 4.0 , via Wikimedia Commons

Enheduanna, High Priestess of Ur

 You follow your naked priest
through the bulrushes and milkweed.
A royal water splasher,
he pours a libation into the carp-
filled canal to feed
Nanna, the Moon God
and Ningal his wife, wife
you will soon become.
 
You bring her alabaster statue
to the river bank, rub
her and yourself with soap,
wash vagina, breasts
and thighs, restoring virginity.
Mingled in sweet water,
you merge, two waves,
two wives, one human,
one divine who needs
a body, your body to copulate.
 
You don Lady Ningal’s
brimmed felt hat
and white gown. It is sewn
with tiers of tufted wool;
these her feathers of a bird
goddess flutter on the breeze
scented with mountain juniper.
 
Wife now of the Moon,
you find him lazing beside
his cattle pens in the marsh.
They teem with satisfied cows
and softly lowing calves.
He curls his bushy tail tuft
over his monumental flanks.
 
Bovine ears poke
from his supernatural sidelocks.
His lapis lazuli beard,
ripples down like a fertilizing
rain that quenches the thirst
of dried canal and riverbed.
 
Gazing at you, Nanna
parts his sensuous lips,
raises a hoof to brush
a fly from his flat nose.
His fierce, bulging eyes
soften with joyous allure.
Lightning flashes from his towering
headgear; you tremble.
 
Off in the date palms,
goats frisk to the beat
of a drum. Harp strings,
their glittering notes gladden
the hearts of young women:
 “Let us dance in the cowshed.
Let the rocking of the churn
sing out. Let it throb
with milk, with buttery cream.”
 
Nanna sets you on a rustic
throne, offers you buttery
barley cakes and cups
of his wild grape wine,
wine that turns what he bellows
in the meadows into sweet talk.
 
He lounges on a bed strewn
with rose and vetch. His lunar
crown lights up the woven
roof of rushes and reeds.
Lord of the brown-eyed
cow and her virile bull,
Lord of their countless herds,
he lifts up his bridal gift,
well-built, never tiring.
 
Untold secret of secrets,
how will he take you?
Press his loins against
yours, or will he mount
your offered back coitus
a tergo?  Night is closing
its city gates. He retires
over the stone threshold
and into his cloudy mountain,
leaves behind a diadem,
proof of his moonlit visit.

​
Picture
Dendara Mamisi (Birth Temple) Relief, by Unknown Carvers (Egypt) 379-360 BCE. Roland Unger, CC BY-SA 3.0 , via Wikimedia Commons.

Frog-Headed Heqet Speaks From a Dendera Nativity Scene

I come from the oldest cult:
frogs and serpents from the unbound
abyss. My footprints on riverbanks,
their moist hieroglyphs, taught
my husband, the potter god
Khnum, the mysteries of creation,
slurry, silt and mud.
 
Khnum’s flood rages
for three days and three nights,
overflowing the river’s thighs;
my children slide forth.
Black moons, they bob
by the hundreds, some say
thousands. Crescent tails
break through clouds of jelly,
beat and glide towards swamps.
A deep-throated chorus
fills the night air.
 
My wavy-horned, ram-
headed Khnum palms
a lump of wet clay,
ancestral seed, lunar
egg. He slaps it into orbit.
Kicking his laboring wheel,
he squeezes, lifts and nips
to refine its waxing shape.
 
The carvers of our bas-relief,
awed by the seriousness of divinity,
cut a severe line
for my mouth. With their copper chisels,
they tucked my human legs,
frog-like, under me.
They knelt me beneath Khnum,
who polishes with a round pebble,
the grainy shoulder of the statue
spinning on his stone wheel.
 
Don’t be fooled by my lowly
station. I preside over
what is most momentous.
I who transform gills to lungs,
raise my tapered river-
loving snout, my magical
words, my golden ankh
to the naked soon-to-be
boy on the slowing wheel.
 
I touch my ankh to his untried
nose, filling it with sweet
marsh air. The gurgle
from his watery past gushes
into a shrill cry.  We help
him down from the placenta-shaped
wheel, down into time,
littered with the piles of wasters
and red shards, the ones
Khnum will crush and knead
with muck and dung to throw
anew on his eternal wheel.

Charlotte Hussey
​
These poems are from the author's series on lunar animals.

Charlotte Hussey, who has an MFA from Warren Wilson College, teaches medieval literature at Montreal’s Dawson College. She has published Rue Sainte Famille and The Head Will Continue to Sing. Completing a McGill University doctorate on the poet H.D. awakened her love of antiquity and led to her publication of Glossing the Spoils, a collection drawing on Western European mythologies that came out in the UK in a second edition in 2017.  Her poems can be found in Garden Varieties: An Anthology of the Top Fifty Poems from the National Poetry Contest; 150+ Canada’s History in Poetry; Soul of the Earth: the Awen Anthology of Eco-spiritual Poetry; Pagan Muse: Poems of Wisdom and Inspiration, and in The Deep Music: Offerings from the Awen.  Her work appears in numerous literary magazine in Canada, the UK, and US. She can be reached at charlotte.hussey@mcgill.ca

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