Ana's Home - The Beast At War

Content:

THE BEAST (The Beast And The Limpid)
BLOOD AT THE THRESHOLD
TRUE HUNGER (Nea)
PRAYER BEFORE WAR (Nea)
PLEDGE WITH THE SKY
DEAR MURDERER
THE END OF THE TRAVEL (Nea)

SUN SEPRENT (Deogae)
HANDS (The Golden Hands Of The Demon)
SHOUTING (The Golden Hands Of The Demon)
SLEEP NOW
DEATH, MY LOVER

ALTHOUGH BROKEN AND LOCKED UNDERGROUND
THE SECOND LIFE OF THE WARRIOR (The Golden Hands Of The Demon)

THE BEAST

Thus, I grow…
Each day my hands are longer,
The high forehead resembles bark.
Behold,
I am a woman of power!
More and more
I grab and lose
By my ferocities.
And with each gift of the body
Death has more of me.

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BLOOD AT THRESHOLD

From infinity to infinity it pours over,
Yet it is human only at the threshold.
Such a void gate is a miracle:
With no frame but with one amazed Nothing
Beamingly breathing
Wedged in the frame.

Only the threshold gleams oddly,
It promises and yokes:
On its left it vanquishes,
On its right it strokes.

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TRUE HUNGER

There is only one hunger.
There is a hunger like age and change.
Like a startling blood, almost eternal,
Like a wolfish silence curled within.

There is one blood, one malice,
A silent wile bonded to a sea.
There are pitiless waves which ache that burning,
There is an ill blood, like a void malady.

There is one black sea incessantly beating,
A blood that evenly pounds beneath all sills,
There is one passion that cannot be uttered,
There is one power which destroys us all.

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PRAYER BEFORE WAR
March 2001

O Sunlike beings, do not kill us all!
Leave one hermit undisclosed,
leave one linen undefiled,
leave one soul undeparted,
open-eyed, yet undaunted.
Leave a streak of vim and pain,
once forgotten that was planted,
to grow a sun-worm once again.

By what famine we learnt so far
that rivers flood, the sea is barred.
I never doubted or tore off, faithful,
the love for hunger, the anchor of plenty.
No more fathers, no land to stand on,
exposed and barren as a winter wrong.

My charred soil rises
in an ungrazed hill:
the grass does not know me,
the hail pelts on still.
Yet the heart, though a desert,
yearns for a final gesture:
the left palm in the storm,
the right into the pasture -
Now doom can come
and humble my skin,
smash all the dams,
bury the proud foundling.
The insatiable tide
is coming for its kin,
to destroy and divide,
though nothing is to win.

Mighty Ones, who love us
beyond our emptied graves,
leave two lovers,
leave a bed.
Leave a shelter,
a calm palm-spread.
O Shiny Ones,
leave us all!
To live and die as tales
humble and meekly told.
Leave our loves to unfold.
And then, appeased,
We'll leave alone.

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PLEDGE WITH THE SKY

Sky, let's make a pledge:
nothing will stand between your forehead and mine.
no winter growth, no shadow, no rain
will take your place in my room.

I often sleep to avoid dreaming.
You have seen me err and walk on again.
Yet you never blinked or turned your back on me,
nor fell so low as to interfere.

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DEAR MURDERER

So what? Still, when I die, I will lay in earth.
You will pace her and my face.
We will warm up your feet in our soil-palms
and we will caress you as a sun-sprout,
quick, oblivious and deaf,
who has caught the wind in a clew,
which slowly, in a stronger and darker storm,
invisibly wears away.

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THE END OF THE TRAVEL

All warriors, who cannot find but peace,
often after death walk in silence
where their foe never walks more,
to stand on a blazing coast or cloud.

Still the empty fist clenches to ache,
ill for that weapon that ripped days,
but in this silver mist there is no-one's gaze
and to walk is like a mountain, disturbed and awake.

All slain warriors who awake to find
a life to be lived more, beauty-torn and laced,
to adore, painfully, the morning sun, slowly,
and all the courage gather to endure its embrace.

All the ones who lived and ceased to speak their lives,
the final road folds them back into an everlasting pass.

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SUN SERPENT

On a long beach
With a strong Sun upon the wings
I sit incessant.

With fingers that play the World's riches
The moist soil, the noble grass,
While, serpent-like, I burrow avid,
Biting mountains, rocks, powerful trees,
Chewing the air so icy.

While the monstrous body
Deeply echoes,
Drums
Upon the mighty earth.

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HANDS

The left hand tears asunder,
The right hand fills in.
Now the left,
With a mind of steel,
Sways amiss
And cuts from the root to chest.
The right one cannot stop the blood,
So it remains silent, cries for a while,
Yet tears cannot build a dam.

Thenceforth I speak amiss -
I stutter and I slice.

When the blood speaks
I sway firmly
And turn everything into smoke.

The right hand wrenches,
It wants to escapee,
To flow away in tears
To be left on the road.
Yet the left does not let it:
It would miss its made.

Still, at nighttime,
A forceful blood
Pales and arises,
It speaks of wrong,
Of murder and of beast.

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SHOUTING

I vie with the Dead in shouting -
Who deader
deeper will burn?

Shout Shout
We, ugly truthlovers,
In love with death.
The dead loves with deadness.
In death all are blood-kin.

H-u-o-oh! H-u-o-oh!
Our fingers are horns,
Our height is wind
Running through the horns.
The Dead have strings in the hips
And the play and play.
There is more of a nightmare
Even than death.

In dream I evil-talk to my brother:
That mutes my beak.
With heavy feathers I strike him;
In sounds I myself am buried.

Wild is my throat,
No-one understands the howling.
Wildness haunts me like malicious gossip,
Malicious wind fallen from the stars.
It forges its wise basis
In clear foundations,
In pure hours,
In malquiescent dawn
Where ancient storm awaits.

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SLEEP NOW

Sleep now, Child of the Desert!
You know tomorrow war will come.
The city streets live in wounds.
But listen to what the Old Hunter says,
Listen to his gentle whisper, his low voice:

"Death will come tenderly;
I will lay you quietly on the bed like a lover.
I'll look carefully into your eyes
Until I see their starlight off.
Sleep now, Child.
Tomorrow I will come."

The morning of the Wounds.

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DEATH, MY LOVER

I lie naked in your embracing mind.
I lost the shame of my worst enemy,
I lost my face, I assented to death -
Yes, you are beautiful to me.

I live my bones. I dream my thoughts.
I stand beside my newborn words -
I never wanted more to be.
Yet sometimes I wonder,
as the nights turn colder,
has anyone else loved me so committedly.

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ALTHOUGH BROKEN AND LOCKED UNDERGROUND

The thief in me asked for gold -
for gold of the kind that runs through the fingers and is lost.
That kind that pains the heart when it leaves,
so that the heart too leaves to follow.

Better a thief without gold,
than a heart spilled behind.

Even a thief has a heart.

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THE SECOND LIFE OF THE WARRIOR

The heart because of wounds
Turns toward evil.

Thus warriors defend their worlds.
Voiceless they fall asleep
And blue winter floods over.

Then,
A Warrior awakes in a Beauty,
With bones like sigh,
With eyes like sunrise,
Defending the bloodthirst.

Now the World needs t be saved from beauty.

The saddest winter
When there is no Beauty.

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