Atlantis and Egypt (cont.)
Two Poem Cycles by Linda Pearce
The Egypt Poems (cont.)
By Linda Pearce
SKIING THE PYRAMIDS
Moving backward to the pyramids
I wonder about the nature of their genesis -
was it construction? or creation? or birth?
Humans build and spirit creates,
but only life gives birth:
incarnation reels at the thought!
Yet the pyramids have certain organic traits:
we do not know they did not grow from sand
which grew to stones and then to slabs;
we do not know in fact the pyramids weren’t born
from some enormous granite womb;
we do not know they have not watched
and listened all these years;
we do not know they are not breathing now.
Well, enough of this freeform reverie:
my palette is impractical,
I ask for colours that do not yet exist.
I keep trying to retroplay the forensics,
picking at the bones of the evidence
disaggregating the stones
and throwing off questions like spray from a fountain.
Then I try to tackle my ignorance mathematically
(while superimposing some geometric grid)
but the algebraic mystery
just keeps dividing itself by pi
and multiplying its possibilities by infinity.
I walk around the problem
like the circumambulation of the priesthood
struggling against the counterrotation of our cultures
and coming to a complete halt
up against the third-party intersection of the gods.
I examine the monuments to our own time
and deduce from them what must be our philosophy:
“get by, get ahead, get stuff, get more”.
I examine the monuments to that ancient race
and deduce from them what must be their philosophy:
“live in such a way that after you die
you will reunite with the divine”.
Enabled by the past and ennobled by history
the pyramids are a pedagogical tool for humankind,
a sort of distance education for the earth
employing their interdisciplinary curriculum
for the critical masses.
Through some miracle of tardiness
we are only beginning to mine the message now,
and in a marvellous juxtaposition of timeframes
the centuries have curved around like space
to meet before our startled eyes, right here and now.
Still, it’s an axiom in the marketplace
that someone will always undertake
the wholesale exploitation of every mystery.
If there were snow, there would be a chairlift
up the north side, and people renting skis
in a quaint little pyramid-shaped chalet;
others would be kayaking out across the delta
to climb the iceberg. However long the ice age,
and however hard I try,
I can’t quite scrape enough frost off the glass
to make out the mystery beneath.
However many metaphors I come up with
the pyramids are always one allegory further down the line,
spilling their sweet secrets into someone else’s ears.
Who that someone is we cannot know,
yet I have long desired to follow the builders
into whatever heaven they escaped to,
to ask them why they built, and who they are.
I feel, I know not how, that the pyramids’
asynchronous communication with our century
has something to do with explaining
the demographics of paradise.