Poem for the End of the World
by Obi Martin
See the toddler laughing at
The milk cow and the mountain cat,
The one scratches the other’s back,
On grass and milk they each grow fat,
Oh there’s honey and cream in Zion.
The rednecks and the Mexicans
Sweat side-by-side as brother men,
The Mennonites and Amish folk
Are pulling strong at the same yoke,
Pulling to Mt. Zion.
The Bruderhof and the Vaishnavas,
Hutterites at Rafiatra,
New Vrindaban, Meadow Run,
We’re leaving at the morning sun
And going to Mt. Zion.
The Evangels and Ex-vangels
Are holding hands and ringing bells,
The Catholics and the Anglicans
Are packing bags and calling friends
To let ’em know about Zion.
Republicans and immigrants
Are washing pots and pitching tents,
The hillbillies and Democrats
Are making tea and packing snacks—
It’s not that far to Zion.
Methodists and Orthodox
Are cashing out their long-term stocks,
They’re bringing gifts to Zion.
The unchurched and the Jesus freaks
Are lacing up their beat-up sneaks,
They’re racing to Mt. Zion.
My family’s rich, my family’s poor,
My family’s knocking door to door
With an invitation you can’t ignore,
We’re going to Mt. Zion.
Obi Martin enjoys being told a story.
Photography by Kenneth Godoy
there once was a buddhist cow
who gave her lord vishnu a bow
though she couldn’t explain
the sheer absence of pain
yet her om was turned into an ow
and how, we might add
when seeking a heavenly city
do we linger instead for a ditty
why indeed does the world spin so round up over easy flights of half planed happiness…
we have not yet solved the dispute between the supremacy of krishna or vishnu but regardless of which deity rises to the top how can we speak of moving together to zion when rafiatra moves inexorably from devotion to krishna into the utter selfrealization of nirvana what has zion to do with the piety of buddhists anyway, why drag us up long convoluted psalms of ascent to a place we dont want to go when all we truly desire is the peace of mergence with a tranquility beyond the reach of our horrid superegos and all the nastiness about german ethical systems. i dont see how the end of all things or the end of the world makes nirvana look anything like zion, why all the denominationals holding hands and singing kumbaya like heavens gonna be such a pasture full of cows, pasture full of cows my bull, thats what they get i guess if they want to come back in refurbished bodies instead of melting away into the white hot hole of emptiness where self is indistinguishable from the luv of all omnipneumatheos
pearing the warm glow of bhakti on the way to moksha clashes apples with
the hard edged claimants of the auld creedal corporealities with all the sweat and scit of their bodies that they want sprung up with them on the last day, on the road to the bars of resurrecting heart valves, the sound of angels wings is soft and low, too close to the dirt where we cut our teeth on pain.
you speak nice, speak clever sounds, make want all to be happy make we all just sing together till our disangreements fade away into the cracks between where we thought true things used to bear down on us heavy and incontrovertible. not so fast, we dont all want zion. half baked gestures of inclusivity beg the question of what is left for all to be included in if every destination turns out the same ether of extract universal sociality. doesnt that put us all on the road to nirvana, at the end of the day, instead of the bloody rock on a hill that they call zion… perhaps to have your cake and eat it too you have to eat everything with your mind and fold it all into an optimystic castle in the air that we all must be bound to inhabit whether we want to or not. i like the sound of you dude but you just took one step too far out on that branch and i thought i heard something cracking or cackling. theres snakes in some of the best trees my dude so you might want to check before you make cider out of too many pears some of them could be more tricky depending what tree they are from they might even distill everything they touch with you inside and nirvana may well be all you never knew you werent hoping for the way you talk about zion my dear sir
My friend you are a poet, and I wouldn’t mind having your words in my ear more often. I had expected internal pushback from my team on this piece actually, so I had expected to need to provide an authors note to accompany it. Had that authors note been published, it would have read something like this. “This poem does not take Zion to be a geographic, political, or even necessarily eschatological reality, but rather the set of human relational patterns which allows God to become fully present within history and the Kingdom of Heaven to come on earth. The term ‘Mt. Zion’ is used specifically for the weight of its lyrical precedence, especially in the Psalms, and it’s cultural resonance to evangelical Americans, a presumed majority of the poems audience.” I don’t presume any of the groups highlighted in the poem to have a larger share of Zion then anyone else; my hope is that they all share in the bringing of Heaven to earth.
well i guess we can upturn the auld world images along the lines of a post-classical immanence, detach the world-speak zion from the resonance of soaked textuality & its generations.
are these the communitarian reconfigurations of religious commitment along the lanes of a post dialtone hegel speak, or the anthropological conjuring of judeo-christian sentiment while jumping eternally over the practicals of its toe-breaking stumbling blocks? what might a masked hindu say to the subversion of evangelical mind things?
perhaps, perhaps not where are our buddhist friends when we need them…
subversion can get more preachy than poetic, not that poetry cant preach but refurbishing too many misnomers up into abstraction can run the risk of propaganda, especially if you achieve sneaky feeling through a mostly misunderstood synthesis. persnickety, you might say, but untethered uncommunication of humane archetypical manifestations might not make your evangelical angels much happier than a half baked gestures to hindu speak even if geography and eschatology never enter the equation.
P.s., thank you for introducing the tell Omnipnuematheos to me.