In the Prologue to People of the Sea: A Novel of The Promised Land, women and men of the Sea Peoples’ tribes hold council on how to confront their greatest crisis—and first, a Pelasgian woman recounts their story of Creation:
As ever first to rise,
Pelasgoi, and a woman—a Turan, as we say Lady.
Pyx the name,
a daughter of Earth-Gaia’s first human beings.
In every one of you, that blood
bears memory of your first mothers and fathers,
and sure as your feet know
the paths of your grandmothers’ orchards
we know
Goddess
brought Herself forth
and gave Being
space and light
in parting waters from the sky.
Her senses
like a crane rising into the morning
rose to the goodness
and in joy She spoke
Her name of great dominion,
Eurynome.
The word
in its vast vibration of Her happiness
became a rhythm, and Her body
danced a gentle joy
that rose within Her senses
to the knowing of Her own infinitude.
Her spirit moved in love on the face of the waters
and Her dance raised up prodigious wind
behind Her, shimmering, quick-bright, silver,
a thing mysterious, beautiful, a monster
who came awake in love with what He saw.
Hai-ee! Snake, prodigious beast of being
following Her, became
Her Partner in this dancing of the world.
Hai-ee!
Beyond themselves, between the world’s pillars, together
the dance love incarnate,
the horned new moon the cradle of infant suns,
the swaying of the sea beside the sky.
His wanting Her is the deep waters girdling the world,
the serpent in the swaying of my hips
and in our gardens, holy communions:
to Her he poured his coiled-up innards out,
and love brought forth The Egg that birthed the world.
Who remembers this world young,
full moon the mate of summer sun, the first dawn of Gi
when the green mountains sang in flowers,
rivers clapped hands
and every star of morning shouted joy?
Pelasgoi. And so with our first eyes
we see the ruin you blood-sick boys have wrought,
you kings, you walled-up thieves who made us peasants.
Six hundred spears of family come running to this fight,
black as this remembering blood between us.
Tell you why: never once surrendered, not a child of us
to that first fool of you, posted at your crotch:
Snake, prodigious Ophion, the father of your imbecilic lies.
Who saw the splendor of the world
and told His Mother and Her young, I made you:
She gave Him Her good heel across the head,
kicked His teeth out, too, to help him think again,
and from those teeth Pelasgians were born.
I give you this, it’s why we make such troubles!
Younglings of the never-conquered sun,
we are The West, the flight from madness:
daemon of you all, ragged tribes, silent, sullen-proud,
first and thirteenth people of the world.
Flood-riders, children of the cranes, the salt in you,
raisers of gigantic stones that outlive memories of men.
Gozo, Nuraghi, seed of the Tyrrhenoi, from Thessaly
through the Cyclades and the twelve great isles of Asia,
we taught men’s hands the ways of grain
and now we scrape for food in holes of mice.
Squanderers of seed! Great chiefs, dispossessed by wishes,
taste in smoke and fire what we bore first.
Do not say it, Achaians of the south and north,
Argivi, Ironheads, that your fathers did not take
our grandmothers’ groves, their mysteries and children
from Argos plain to Mother Kriti‘s isles, Miletus, Troy.
Never speak again that we forget the great homes
roofed with rainbow tiles, shining by the sea at Lerna:
the first age of the world you turned to slavery and ash.
Your broke-tooth misery is Goddess law come down,
and we rejoice.
Hai-ee! Tomorrow, the last of our bloods marry after all.
On Ramses’ jaw-hook blade? Or a spread of bottom-land?
See you at the altar.
(To be continued)
(Meet Mago Contributor) Jack Dempsey