Namtar - Tumblr Posts

These are the children of Ereshkigal, the dark-eyed: Ninazu, by Gugulanna Heaven's-Bull Namtar, by Father Enlil who sits enthroned in state Nungal, by the queen of the dead and the dust of time that keeps her secrets. These are their titles. Ninazu, city-god, Enega and Ešunna, death-and-life through vegetation and the shadow of the never-never in his blood. Pitiless mace of war, dying and rising serpent-friend. He will suck the poison from your wounds. Namtar, inexorable. Right hand of the sinister, mouth of hell's crown, messenger of An and Ereshkigal and Nergal. Commander of demons whose very name breathes a plague, unfaltering fate, dutiful minister of his mother's court, Death who is the issue of the Dead's All-Mother. Nungal, the neck-stock, the dusty threshold bolt, the screaming lock, the fanged river of ordeals. Rebirther, reformer, who dwells in the mountain where Utu rises. Hers is that corner of the underworld man can return from reforged, the house of dust and shadows where a broken man sheds his old skin or wears it as burial shroud. Goddess Prison-Warden, her mother's daughter in the realm of men, radiant hope and beautiful despair, cool water of compassion on fevered brows. Hear their names in the bellow of a bull, in the snarl of a dragon, in the tolling-bell tones of their mother and as soft as crematory ash. They sit on the borderline like ravens on a fence, silent dark eyes and subtle croaked secrets, twilight-and-dawn owls, young-and-old serpents. Poison and healing, life found in death. Fear. Learn. Become braver for it. Ereshkigal, for deserved awe of you and your children, may your names be marked by the black-headed ones.

Choking

Choking I hear her-

-blue veins and bruises and chapped lips and coffee teeth-

-and look for the person in this paper maché prop.

There is just enough love in blood ties and dandelion memories

For the solemnity to sink past the alien greyscale

As I color in the numbers of this silent moving picture.

She comes from an alien world,

The dusty brittle grass where my family was forged

Oil and grain and cattle.

It was not an empire of silks,

No palenquin or servants or gilt dogcarts,

But an empire scraped out of the gritty landscape,

Flogged out of it like meal from the mouth of a sacred dog.

And who knew it would become the river of stars we see each night,

Taken for granted but for those strange-minded poets

Or those highly educated astronomers

Who "don't know dogshit"?

And she-

Immortal, stern, cold, proud, pious,

Pressed flower preserved in a snapshot of time

Brittle prarie grass twisted into mooring rope-

She was the closest thing to a Disney princess

Or those wild and foreign noblewomen from yellowed buckram hardbacks

Embossed in faded gold

That I could safely say I knew.

Her husbands dead,

Her children dead,

Her grandchildren and that one odd great-granddaughter

[Shittalk was our mother tongue, nothing but breeze to shoot behind everyone else's back, I knew the game]

Bending over her

And her sweet green legacy.

All grown past grassroots

Who've earned the right to say

"Just park there, fuck 'em. We are doctors."

With small clans of their own on the rise.

Choking

Choking

She wants to die

And her throat moves with sharp purpose

Like the carefully crafted whirligigs out past Witchita

And despite myself I cannot help

But pray soundlessly through my teeth

That they might not catch me invoking such terrible things

Beneath a graven image of the bleeding cross.

Namtar is almost to the doorway,

Stepping past the orderlies and beneath the muted TV-

Or perhaps Azrael comes for Christians?-

Either way, I pray,

And her arm whips out imperiously

To shoo us all from her presence

As she croaks an answer to our questions.

I think I understand a bit better

The old stories of old Natives

Walking into the brush to die.

I saw a bit of that in her, that ferocity,

That cold pride.

I love her

As one loves nostalgia

And blood that never truly left stains on my childhood.

She was more than I'll ever know, and during the writing of this

Went quietly into that good night,

And probably snapped at her reaper for waiting so long.

Beautiful, clever, and tough as nails.

May she have cool water and fine company

Wherever her soul comes to roost.

I loved her

And I choke in the quiet way

Of a person strange to mourning

Who cannot quite

Cry.