DREAM VESSELS # 3: Night Goddess

DREAM VESSELS # 3:   Night Goddess          

            from a collage by Marsha Connell

The hawk Horus landed here first, or at least that's what is said.

Seated on funerary divans, the rulers of the Upper and Lower kingdoms

wear the sun of Horus; the bull between the sun,

and the root hunger of cobras, rays of Ra. Amun.

The sun in gold cartouches immortalized on temple walls.

Nefertiti sleeps, her profile, a landscape.

What is Egypt but an fertile dream of Africa?

The Fellahim, tillers of black earth.

Did worry beads first appear when the two kingdoms

were united in marriage and death?

Plenty of sand in Egypt; who first thought to melt sand

into faence? Tin from Welsh mines took cooperation, not war.

Another ridge on the ribbon road. Ivory and beads,

as if coral wept from all the blood spilled.

In the presence of so much stone, the rider

on a white horse is but a small afterthought.

Moving through worlds, searching for a sense of place,

we disturb what's taken out of context: millions of potshards

from the pilgrims who fed the gods millenia on end.

The sun's rays fracture and separate on the lintel

the way a child's drawing depicts the sun with rays—

all curved and geometric at the same time.

Where is the white sand island rising from the sea of chaos?

The reed shrine holding the image of the hawk?

Why are all the women asleep with their unadorned profiles

to the sky? Where is Isis?

Here, there is no personal story to lean on.

Juxtaposed against two worlds,

our modern debris is seeking home.

On hands and feet, the goddess of the night, 

Nut, has stretched her body across the sky.

Nefertiti's Nubian ear, a dark shell

in the wrinkled folds at sunset.

Anubis, God of the Dead, seeks New World Order.

Summer 91 & 92

DREAM VESSELS —from collages by Marsha Connell