the apocalyptic wrath of Jehovah

veradico

Has anyone here ever read Donald Hall's "Prophecy," from The One Day: A Poem In Three Parts? It gives Deuteronomy chapter 28 a run for its money. Its disturbing vision is sure to thrill those dubs whose only Christmas wish (if they could have such a pagan thing) would be for everyone else to just die already. And it makes the perfect tribute to that strange deity, Jehovah, that manly person of war who drowned to death an entire world for the ironic sin of being too violent.

Where shopping malls

spread plywood and plaster out, and roadhouses

serve steak and potatoskins beside Alaska king crab;

where trianguar flags proclaim tribes of identical campers;

where airplanes nose to tail exhale kerosene,

weeds and ashes will drowse in continual twilight.

I reject the old house and the new car; I reject

Tory and Whig together; I reject the argument

that modesty of ambition is sensible because the bigger

they are the harder they fall; I reject Waterford;

I reject the five and dime; I reject Romulus and Remus;

I reject Martha's Vineyard and the slamdunk contest;

I reject leaded panes; I reject the appointment made

at the tennis net or on the seventeenth green; I reject

the Professional Bowlers Tour; I reject matchboxes;

I reject purple bathrooms with purple soap in them.

Men who lie awake worrying about taxes, vomiting

at dawn, whose hands shake as they administer Valium, --

skin will peel from the meat of their thighs.
Armies that march all day with elephants past pyramids

and roll pulling missiles past generals weary of saluting

and past president-emperors splendid in cloth-of-gold, --

soft rumps of armies will sissipate in rain. Where square

miles of corn waver in Minnesota, where tobacco ripens

in Carolina and apples in New Hampshire, where wheat

turns Kansas green, where pulpmills stink in Oregon, --

dust will blow in the darkness and cactus die

before it flowers. Where skiers wait for chairlifts,

wearing money, low raspberries will part rib bones.

Where the drive-in church raises a chromium cross,

dandelions and milkweed will straggle through blacktop.

I will strike from the ocean with waves afire;

I will strike from the hill with rainclouds of lava;

I will strike from darkened air

with melanoma in the shape of decorative hexagonals.

I will strike down embezzlers and eaters of snails.

I reject Japanese smoked oysters, potted chrysanthemums

allowed to die, Tupperware parties, Ronald McDonald,

Kaposi's sarcoma, the Taj Mahal, Holsteins wearing

electronic necklaces, the Algonquin, Tunisian aqueducts,

Phi Beta Kappa keys, the Hyatt Embarcadero, carpenters

jogging on the median, and betrayal that engorges

the corrupt heart longing for criminal surrender.

I reject shadows in the corner of the atrium

where Phyllis or Phoebe speaks with Billy or Marc

who says that afternoons are best although not reliable.

Your children will wander looting the shopping malls

for forty years, suffering for your idleness,

until the last dwarf body rots in a parking lot.
I will strike down lobbies and restaurants in motels

carpeted with shaggy petrochemicals

from Maine to Hilton Head, from Skagit to Tucson.

I will strike down hang gliders, wiry adventurous boys;

their thigh bones will snap, their brains

slide from their skulls. I will strike down

families cooking wildboar in New Mexico backyards.

Then landscape will clutter with incapable machinery,

acres of vacant airplanes and schoolbuses, ploughs

with seedlings sprouting and turning brown through colters.

Unlettered dwarves will burrow for warmth and shelter

in the caves of dynamos and Plymouths, dying

of old age at seventeen. Tribes wandering

in the wilderness of their ignorant desolation,

who suffer from your idleness, will burn your illuminated

missals to warm their rickety bodies.
Terrorists assemble plutonium because you are idle

and industrious. The whip-poor-will shrivels

and the pickerel chokes under the government of self-love.

Vacancy burns air so that you strangle without oxygen

like rats in a biologist's bell jar. The living god sharpens

the scythe of my prophecy to strike down red poppies

and blue cornflowers. When priests and policemen

strike my body's match, Jehovah will flame out;

Jehovah will suck air from the vents of bombshelters.

Therefore let the Buick swell until it explodes;

therefore let anorexia starve and bulimia engorge.

When Elzira leaves the house wearing her tennis dress

and drives her black Porsche to meet Abraham,

quarrels, returns to husband and children, and sobs

asleep, drunk, unable to choose among them, --

lawns and carpets will turn into tar together

with lovers, husbands, and children.

Fat will boil in the sacs of children's clear skin.

I will strike down the nations, astronauts and judges;

I will strike down Babylon, I will strike acrobats,

I will strke algae and the white birches.

Because professors of law teach ethics in dumbshow,

let the colonel become president; because chief executive

officers and commissars collect down for pillows,

let the injustice of cities burn city and suburb;

let the countryside burn; let the pineforests of Maine

explode like a kitchenmatch and the Book of Kells turn

ash in a microsecond; let oxen and athletes

flash into grease: -- I return to Appalachian rocks;

I shall eat bread; I shall prophesy through millennia

of Jehovah's day until the sky reddens over cities:

Then houses will burn, even houses of alabaster;

the sky will disappear like a scroll rolled up

and hidden in a cave from the industries of idleness.

Mountains will erupt and vanish, becoming deserts,

and the sea wash over the sea's lost islands

and the earth split open like a corpse's gassy

stomach and the sun turn as black as a widow's skirt

and the full moon grow red with blood swollen inside it

and stars fall from the sky like wind-blown apples, --

while Babylon's managers burn in the rage of the Lamb. [emphasis added]

Reading stuff like that can hopefully elucidate the disturbingly darkened mind.

Peace

Lowden

avengers

Nice. It just makes me love God and religion more and more.

the apocalyptic wrath of Jehovah

veradico

TheKings

TheKings

TheKings

yaddayadda

lowden

avengers

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