At last no flags at half
For the black smoke pope
In these New Jerusalem hills,
Just a President's seal, a crisp
Old Glory and the red flag
Of the Marines briskly waving.
All presidents get a library
To go with their other boondoggles,
To bury compromising documents
In a memory hole of record
Forever cut off from the grid
Except from the chosen
Who’ve been given codes to see.
The Dead Sea Scrolls were like that too,
A secret, makeshift library
To bury what is sacred
At the lowest point on Earth
Of what only the pure can see,
Moving down from cave to cave
To save what was being destroyed
As the antediluvian trauma receded.
It was 47 miles away exactly,
The place of their viewing, the most
Common number sequence on earth
(So says Solomon). The sealed scrolls
Were discovered by the sound of thrown
Stones breaking an urn in 1947,
The same year where here, in Simi Valley,
American Jewish University was founded,
Post-Shoah Palestine was partitioned
Along with de-Britained India and Pakistan,
The year of the Marshall Plan, when the Cold War
Began, with the Playtex bra, Polaroid camera,
VW Bug, Bikini, Tupperware, transistors,
The breaking of the sound and color barriers,
The CIA and Roswell, Operation Highjump
In Antarctica.
The energy stones
Above Reagan Freeway
Carry galactic codes.
This place is ordained
As a high priest of wisdom.
A cross is on the top
Of one pyramid
Sunned white
Like the mere crack of light
Out of the Qumran caves
Of the secret long withheld.
They have to make it look
Like the Romans have succeeded.
Israeli Antiquities was effective
At rendering unto Caesar
What is Caesar’s, for they know not
What they do, all that happened
To the total victims
As seen through
The eyes of the conqueror.
It starts with the “Jesus boat” from Galilee
Made of fine black, torqued mahogany.
The Romans used them to kill everyone
On every shore they passed. The Roman
Mystic blue lachrymatory shone
In the glass case with goats unbroken
In ceramic.
But the Madgala Stone,
From the home, so they say, of Mary Magdelene,
Is “furniture” for a Torah scroll.
It has the Tree of Life in limestone,
Snakes, dragons, Ezekiel's galactic
Chariot wheels still and in motion,
A menorah, golden lampstand of
The Temple, in the city of priests
Jerusalem, the scrolls themselves
Poems of its dark alleys and jigsaw
Cul-de-sacs, its purity of being perfectly
Impure. The Zadokites brought purity
As a ritual, which simply meant no truck
With the Romans. The ossuaries in their tombs,
Embossed with flagrant UFOs, were meant
To bury the pure from corrupt institutions,
Not to be gaslit anymore.
There were bone gathering instructions
From Rabbi Elazar ben Rabbi Zardok,
For the families to reconfigure
The bones in stone holding,
Protected from eternity’s
Invasive vibrations.
Menorahs and merkabah’s are everywhere
But nowhere what they meant.
All we know is some who entered
The Holy of Holies, where only the highest
Priest may go, were corrupted,
To weave the spell of the spy, throw law
To the mercy of duality, such purity,
The Zealots of the Yahad
At the ostraca at Masala
Made the ultimate choice
Of deathlife over slaveryfreedom.
It was just one explanatory plate
Among hundreds, one mention
Of Governor Flavius, the guy sent in
To subjugate the Jews again
Just like Egypt, the criminal mastermind
In the end of the religion of peace.
There was no word of this of course
All we get is smooth Josephus, Rome’s PR Jew,
Tell us the script they are sticking to,
The one where the only good scroll
Was a dead one, that’s how it goes
When you try to transmit down
Ancient knowledge through Hebrew
DNA. Who would have thought
It could be buried in the brine
Of a supposedly arid wasteland, where
This Modayot entrepot pottery
Of deuteronomy was found,
Among the Essenes, who “esteemed chastity"
And worked out some side deal
With the Romans?
The line is a labyrinthine spiral
Around a central circle
Where the fragments shine from their tombs.
“This one has a coffee stain,” a young cynic
Helpfully noted, as we went 2 by 2
Like Noah’s Ark, divine couples all,
Musing together, to the goathorn call.
We enter from the left, go right
In the ring, just like we were reading Hebrew,
Only to find that our wait, seemingly,
Was to give the Yahad time to write
For it was written on the go, like Genesis 6-9
Rendered from memory, to preserve the truth
Of the flood with Chinese brush precision
And parchment pure as they tried to be.
Other scolls looked stolen
From the Alexandria Library,
Lost codes so skillfully scrambled
And meanings so surgically removed
By the secret teams of archivists
The Romans would be proud
If they weren’t so petrified!
The names are wrong, dates changed,
Explanations nonsense, for scraps
Indecipherable, arranged to seem
Unimportant, just “The creative way
Of Jewish scholars” and "the unique
Interpretations of the Yahad”
For the Bible (which hadn’t been
Written yet) in the few that passed
Filters to mean something
On the topographic scan of goat skin,
"Technologies designed by NASA.”
The modern peshers grasp at straws
As usual. The powder on the
Trauma’s still dry. But the crowd,
Who’d waited in every language
In long lines to behold it, knew,
Every one of them, had something
In mind. There is a precursor after all
To the books of law handed down by God
Via Messenger, just in time, before everyone
Had given up hope.
There still is the Shekinah,
Where the challenge came down,
Do you really believe? “Thank you,”
Some one said, as if to all of us
Who were there, “for your service.”
Something good had come somehow
For sacrifice. A boy smiles at me,
Two fingers pointing as if to say
"You are a man now."
The truth remained in caves
Where knowledge was made sacred.
The holy codes are in the stone
Anyway, in the temple steps here
Preserved, how they radiate
With countless enlightened feet
Who were grateful to walk its marble,
Every movement a note of reverence.
The stone does not see us
In the same way, not in time,
With the urgency of lives lost to hope,
But how we are the same as all the others,
Like that live feed of the wailing wall,
All Jewish dressed as one,
How we come here as free beings,
How all the crying can be drunk in easily.
The impure, in other words, teaches purity.
We no longer have to live in that way,
With every thought as dangerous
In these halls of New Jerusalem.
The Evangelicals grimaced at my whispers
While the Chosen merely chuckled.
Leave the not being able to speak behind
With these olive trees of peace
In this lover's paradise of Ron and Nancy
Where the outside world can’t touch posterity
Its happiness. Nancy’s white flowers
Are a triumph of purity
Among Abrams Tanks and Masonic Stealth
Cloaking Missilery,
A white lake in the distance,
Too many pyramids to count.
The Yahad merely stayed close
To the light, the galactic Barkhi Nafshi,
Invoked to bring from the heart
Its poems, all of male and female,
The sides of God, who must be released
To service, in each other, in love as the power
Of the universe.
