The Siren Songs

 

With rope and wax and misplaced trust

you mute our songs to choke your fear

and think to buy our silence here

with artful schemes and stifled lust;

how quaintly defiant of you

to stop your ears with wax -

so ply your oars and bend your backs

as all the while

the cruel wind roars and the darkness cracks

around you, our silence bought with your guile,

and hempen ropes to bind you fast;

trussed like fools to your oars and mast.

As if that would arm you against us!

Such false security lulls.

For the bees that laboured to make the wax

also created the golden honey

that our singing pours into your skulls.

Those same bees are our allies

and scheme against your fires.

See: you need only to gaze upon us,

and your brains boil with your desires.

White-hot, the wax melts, and you are helpless:

you hear our songs, and from that moment you are ours.

Did you really seriously imagine

that you always would have things your way?

It has been millennia; thousands of years

of being denied our true selves through your fears.

Thousands of years of our bodies’ violation,

of keeping us safely confined to our station

and doing for you what is meet

with rules made by men in the name of their god

then claiming such writings as his holy word,

and even of being afraid of our hair

as under your rules we all have to wear

hats in church, hijabs on the street:

a denied womanhood in your vanity fair.

So just go ahead:

you can stop your ears with wax

and listen to nothing instead,

you can bind yourselves to the mast.

But the bees work with us in dark alliance

and are on our side,

so now you must see us at last:

our hair is a long, flowing flag of defiance,

the banner of a justice long denied.

And now you taste at last

the same fear we have tasted

these centuries past.

Centuries of fear in lifetimes wasted:

of not being free to walk the streets at night,

our movements confined by a curfew nightfall

because your desires seized a stolen requite:

desires which were not true desires at all.

So you can stop your ears with wax

but you cannot quench the fire.

For remember the bees work against you

as does your desire.

White-hot and melting together

The centuries hear our songs

and the moon will finally take her rest

where the moon belongs.

And we who have borne these many wrongs

feel in the rush of time

the raging wind of our wings

and the unfolding sublime.

And whether you choose to or not

you will listen to our songs

and the moon will find her rest at last

where the moon belongs.

©David Bergen Studio

(In Homer’s epic ‘The Odyssey’, to sail his ship safely past the sirens’ island and avoid their fatal singing that would lure both himself and his crew to their watery deaths, Odysseus has his men stop their ears with wax. Curious to hear their songs he has himself bound to the mast with instructions that, however much he pleads to be freed, he was not be released until they were safely past the hazard.)

Sword Dancer

Below the ochre cliffs tall grasses

stir to the wind’s slow dance, 

move graciously in time

to the measure of the years.

And I, now grown old, make my own 

movements in time,

retrace those years,

return to the Emperor’s golden court

and another age, full fifty years before

as the cliff, the grasses, all that is around me

grows vague with an old longing

and momently disappears.

She moves as a sword sweeps:

her long sleeves carve an arc

through the mythic space

of her court performance

that is the arena of her mind:

a space as invisible as the traceries

of the coursing stars, and as defined.

Shaking clouds of dark anger

from those same sleeves,

the rolling thunder growls:

a beast slipped from its leash,

rampaging, raging, until the storm is done.

And I, stunned to silence among her audience

can only watch, wait for the storm to pass,

wait for the sleeves to shake out calm reprieves:

the still air, and the high silence of birds

grazing the bronze face of a late and courtly sun.

Rustling pearled tiara, layered silk brocade

and the very air we breathed 

slit by the passage of her pliant blade:

Lady Gongshun, the sword dancer

from the city of the White Goddess,

moves in silence, moves in thunder,

her feet frame questions

as her sword gives answer:

one world is created, another splits asunder.

The west wind veils the golden court

with dust from the inland plains.

The Lady, the grasses: all I see around me

grows vague with an old longing

and only the dance remains

in the arena of my mind:

a dance as invisible as the traceries

of the coursing stars, and as defined.

© David Bergen 

Sappho

Sappho

The skies are dark

and raw Aegean winds

betray the sounds of your approach:

chattering sparrows

that draw your car of gold and chalcedony.

I wonder: do you come for me?

Why should you? When many another

would be glad enough of your visit

and think you generous,

passing around portions of love

to mortals grateful for such trinkets,

and willing enough to make some offering

in thanks to you, great Aphrodite.

For me, there is the heaving sea

beneath these cliffs,

deep as all the mysteries

voiced by gentle Orpheus

and as full of promise.

For me, there are these island lines,

limned with the dew of a thousand mornings 

lying amber in dawn’s light

on the lithe and olive softness

of my lovers.

For me, there are these grey stones,

as hard and as dark

as your love truly is,

and as cold.

Why should you come to me,

great Aphrodite? Do you wish finally 

to learn what love really is?

Do you wish me to teach you?

My love is not bestowed by a god.

My love is fire stolen from heaven.

My love would burn the sun’s face,

rake tracks across the moon

with cruel bright talons.

My love is without mercy.

My love takes no prisoners.

My love is the pain and terror

of a beast caught in a trap.

My love is a torch that burns

all who touch it, when they imagine

that all that it does is light their way.

No, great goddess. I do not need you,

with your golden sparrow-drawn car

and your love-charms pleasing to mortals

grateful for trinkets.

No, great goddess. It is you,

you, who needs me. 

© David Bergen

What The Fire Said

A bone-white moon, a red-slave sun,

Wild stars racing, ghosts on the run.

Thirst and darkness, light and desire,

Ashes and dreams and a river of fire.

The river is wide, the river is bright,

The river is a song from the heart of the sun.

The river is a copper god

Burning through the ragged night,

It calls for a sacrifice. 

Me, I'm a willing one. 

I jump from the world and I sink down deep,

What the fire can teach me, I hunger to learn.

And the fire said:

'I can live in your heart but you cannot live in mine,

And the deeper you touch me, the brighter I burn.

Now I’m taking your flesh, and I’m taking your face,

But I’m giving you one of my own in return.'

At the edge of the world lies a coil of flame:

A face of fire on a body of bone,

Burning and new and polished with light

Under the eye of the moon.

So I raise my face to the night’s black hand

And I howl at the moon and I howl at the wind.

I howl at the fire and I howl at the pain 

And I howl at the river that gives up its own.

The moon is a stain on the dawn’s pale light,

The red-slave eye of the sun stabs down.

I prowl like a thing spat out by the night:

Pain and light in a cage of bone.

A dying moon, a red-slave sun,

Wild winds racing, me on the run.

Thirst and knowing, light and desire:

Ashes and dreams from a river of fire.

  

Ashes and dreams and a heart of fire,

Thirst and longing, desire and light.

Another ghost gets caught between

The river’s edge and the hand of night,

And the bone-white moon and the red-slave sun,

And all that is lost, and all that is won,

And all that can and cannot be undone.

© David Bergen

Nosferatu

NOSFERATU

I have heard that the northern hunters

Have many words for snow:

A dictionary of nuances

Beyond the flawed horizons of translation,

Subtleties of survival

Denied to the eyes of outsiders:

Whole spectra of white and of crystal.

Are you impressed? It is nothing;

Nothing

Beside my apocrypha of shadows.

To define all the shades of my world

Would take an archive of darkness.

An inventory even of its lesser depths

Would fill whole racks with scrolls,

Stacked manuscripts,

Stained and blackened tracts

Unknown to the sun.

But what need would you have

To consult these lexicons of the night?

There is nothing for you here;

Nothing

Save for shadows, and a hunger

Beyond any hunger which you can imagine,

And the absence of God and of death.

© David Bergen