Inge Haupt
Chewing CudArchive for mankind
The Soul’s Passage
The souls line up like a million stars,
A river of billowing light and song.
Before them a passage of hours and days,
Behind them the throng
Of heaven’s voices.
Their wing tips humming with the deep thrumb
Of creation.
For behind and below and betwixt and before
Suns, moons, stars and galaxies fall
And rise,
Spinning.
Their incandescent song praising celestial choices.
The passage forged in the bowels of the earth
With fire and brimstone and hands of despair,
Coiled and contorted on a blistering potter’s wheel,
Then finally released into netherwhere.
Born into limbo,
Its cold, hot heart begins to beat;
Its diamond sides glow and pulsate with a soft, low song;
Its spirit awakens and is ready
To beat, burst, thrust
From the belly of the earth;
Through the tearing pain of the mother’s womb,
Through the brimming tears of the father’s soul,
Through space, through time, through the highest hereafter
To the brink of nothingness,
Where stars sing, angels thrumb
And light-clad souls stand at the threshold of eternity.
She glances down at her iridescence,
Diamond-clad soul with the fate of mankind clasped to her breast.
Beside her, the thick cocoon of joy and song
Is rent.
Into the bellowing breach, darkness bubbles through.
A screaming, fearing, thrashing pierces the throng,
Forcing its way through the billowing light and song,
As warders bring her, the doomèd one.
The closer she gets to her passage of pain
The fainter her glow.
Her cloth of light and song fade
As she is torn from divinity;
Light shredded from her being
on the grater of Godless servitude.
Clothed in darkness
And forced to eat the bitter stew
That no mother’s pity, nor father’s sweat could assuage.
A Fairytale
Duplicitous dragon licking his wounds,
Crouched in the back of his lair.
He’d been waiting for her from beginning
Of time, relishing her fall through his snare.
Following gaily the apple blossoms
Carpeting the forest floor;
She wound her way up the steep mountainside,
Trailing vestments of light from times of yore.
He smelt her as she drew closer, tendrils
Of flame ignited his grin.
Dry, brittle scales sithed ‘neeth wing and tail;
With blackest mind’s eye he beckoned her in.
Foliage grew moist under silken-shod feet.
The sunlight began to fail.
Apple blossoms fell few and far between,
But there was yet a faintly gleaming trail.
He spied her through his age-old Awwim eyes.
Seeds of evil he did sow.
Slowly but surely, strongly and swiftly
Apples of damnation began to grow.
Princess did you seek this den of malice?
Why did you drink from the chalice of sin?
‘Twas your burden, your plight, for the sake of
Mankind, to usher the saviour in.
The Tea-Leaf Reader – A Sonnet – Part 2
Come closer still, there is another soul:
A rupture of glorious space and time.
In darkness bubbling, the threshold, un-whole
She crossed. The universe rent down the line.
Religion is bought by your father’s grace.
No Cane nor Abel can now save your soul.
Your spiritual veil torn from your face.
You come to this world poor, lonely, un-whole.
For meaning she strives, philosophers read.
Nor religion, nor art, her to light leads.
Immerses in love and books of the dead,
While through vacuous heart and soul she still bleeds.
Abomination, Godless mutation.
Mankind uses you now, the forsaken.
