"My
wish is to see you, O lord of persea trees!
May
your throat take the north wind, that you may give fullness without eating and
drunkenness without drinking...Pleasant is the utterance of your name: it is
like the taste of life...
"Come
back to us, O lord of continuity. You were here before anything had come into
being, and you will be here when all is gone.
As
you caused me to see the darkness that is yours to give, make light for me so
that I can see you ."
~Prayer
of Neferneferuaten,
from
the tomb of the lay priest Pahweh
Seal Of The Second Millennium
Ten windings round
and a blob of clay
pressed
with the shape of the soulbird
to hold it fast,
prayed over by white taper priests,
wicks of their arms slick with greased perfume
flickering in the chant heavy smoke
while behind the last door
the king waits in his shell
for journey's beginning
from below the rock hill
to the high back of Nut and the night's
soft descent,
a chariot of gold to adorn
the road of her flesh,
a team of ghost horses
to outrun the stars. Such
a journey once started
knows no end.
But for the seal breaker
the foul breath of Set,
the jackal eye before muzzle's gape,
diseased as the mummy's black bones.
Ten twists of the cord
and a last look through the dark
at the golden light
not meant to be owned. Life eternal;
the king that desired it, the priests
that implored it, the sun that
promised it,
someone else will yet have it.
The Nile kept back her gift
for ten dead years
one for each twist, and so
the new god was killed
while the old gods laughed.
The doors of my second life
were sealed as a shrine
with the soulbird kissed upon my brow.
No more will my face
be as the disc of the Aten;
the deep river of the necropolis
brings the last inundation.
~April 2016
posted for real toads
Process notes:
The top photo by Harry Burton (
source) is of the funerary seal on the fifth shrine of the tomb of Tutankhamen before it was broken by Howard Carter and his team in 1923, untouched since the pharoah was entombed, three thousand two hundred years previously.
Second photo: "A relief of a royal couple in the Amarna style; figures have variously
been attributed as Akhenaten and Nefertiti, Smenkhkare and Meritaten(
Neferneferuaten), or
Tutankhamen and Ankhesenamun..“
via wikimedia commons
Third photo: The pharaoh Akhenaten and his family adoring the Aten, second from the left is Meritaten who was the daughter of Akhenaten.
via wikimedia commons
Nut was the Egyptian goddess of the sky and the cosmos.She was often shown as a woman with her back arched above the earth.
Aten
was the sun god, especially as worshiped by the pharoah Akhenaten at
Amarna. For a short history of the Amarna period chronology and events
loosely incorporated in this poem, see
this wikipedia link.
