Midnight Memoirs:
We'd hear sounds of aching missiles
Banging the door of our happiness
Against the lock of divine anguish.
We'd hear the moan of painful demise
Fainting tick by tick as the wind blows beyond
To bury voices in the equator of a silent world.
We'd hear war sing of boredom where
Grounds cry for bloodstains.
Behind our home, hue of grim
Would cover the naked eyes of the land.
We would not sleep.
We'd sniff the dirty smells of death
And see flood of bodies on our streets.
Bodyless heads will be planted in gutters
For in due time, they'd be the relics: the map
That leads our children to their homes.
We'd pant our life through the nostrils of terror
Painting our fear with the colour of a faded faith
Leaving the shadows of distuned hopes to fall on
it.
We would not sleep.
We'd remember this story every night
When the scars of sleeplessness
Stings the pains of a looted peace in our vessels.
We'd stand to sing dirges whose lines die
In the middle of passionate rhythms.
We'd sit to cry for the sons who sailed beneath,
For the daughters who strolled beyond our views,
For the mothers who wailed for all
For those searching for tears with torches.
We would not sleep.
The Vision of the Valley of Dry Bones, Ezekiel -- Gustave Doré
Behold, I show you a mystery; We shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed, in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trump: for the trumpet shall sound, and the dead shall be raised incorruptible, and we shall be changed.
ReplyDelete--1 Corinthians 15:51-52
In ca. 50 St. Paul founded a Christian community in Korinthos, the capital of the new senatorial province of Achaea, when Lucius Junius Gallio Annaeanus (the brother of the playwright/philosopher Lucius Annaeus Seneca) was the proconsul.
The Jewish leaders in the city brought charges against Paul, which were dismissed by Gallio, but the action caused Paul to resolve not to preach in synagogues any more and, instead, to "go to the Gentiles." In ca. 53-57 he settled in Ephesos, the capital of the province of Asia and probably the 2nd-largest city in the empire. It was probably then that he composed the "First Epistle to the Corinthians" to correct some of that church's doctrinal errors. The 15th chapter of the letter was Paul's exposition of his ideas on the resurrection of Jesus.
Doré's print depicted a passage from the "Book of Ezekiel." Y'ḥezqēl ("God's Strength") may, according to some rabbinical sources, have been the son of the prophet Jeremiah ("Yhwh will raise"). Before his birth, the kingdom of Judah had been a vassal of the Assyrian empire, but the rapid decline of Assyria after ca. 630 BCE led king Yoshiyahu (Josiah) to assert his independence and institute a religious reform stressing loyalty to Yahweh. Ezekiel was probably born around that time. However, Josiah was killed in 609 BCE and his son Yehoyaqim was installed as king by Egyptian pharoah Necho II. Yehoyaqim was described by rabbinical literature as a godless tyrant who had incestuous relations with his mother, daughter-in-law, and stepmother, and violated the wives of men he murdered. In 605 BCE Yehoyaqim was forced to recognize the authority of Nebuchadnezzar II of Babylon for 3 years, but a failed Babylonian invasion of Egypt caused him to renew Egyptian overlordship. In 598 BCE Nebuchadnezzar took Jerusalem after a 3-month siege and had Yehoyaqim's corpse thrown over the walls without a burial. (According to Jeremiah, his dead body was "cast out to the heat of the day and the frost of the night.") It was also claimed that it was put into the skin of a dead ass. In 596, following an unsuccessful rebellion, the remaining elements of the royal court, including the last scribes and priests (including 25-year-old Ezekiel) were sent into captivity in Babylon. When he was 30 he began having prophetic visions. In Ezekiel 37:1–14 God showed him a valley "full of bones .... and I saw a great many bones on the floor of the valley, bones that were very dry." God ordered him to announce, "This is what the Sovereign Lord says to these bones: I will make breath enter you, and you will come to life. I will attach tendons to you and make flesh come upon you and cover you with skin; I will put breath in you, and you will come to life." AS Ezekiel spoke, "there was a noise, a rattling sound, and the bones came together, bone to bone. I looked, and tendons and flesh appeared on them and skin covered them, but there was no breath in them." Then God told him to say, "This is what the Sovereign Lord says: Come, breath, from the four winds and breathe into these slain, that they may live.” Then "breath entered them; they came to life and stood up on their feet -— a vast army." Then God had Ezekiel announce, "My people, I am going to open your graves and bring you up from them; I will bring you back to the land of Israel. Then you, my people, will know that I am the Lord, when I open your graves and bring you up from them. I will put my Spirit in you and you will live, and I will settle you in your own land."