By N.C. Krueger
2nd Place, Poetry, Create | Encounter 2024
I.
God is jealous, and His Heat
is dread to those who despise what He has made.
II.
The Elders once vultured
over the Scorpion Tower, red dewlaps swelling like bubblegum;
the monolith twined—a girl’s braid from where she hangs
upside-down, white dress over her face—and clanked upward
while they sung: “We will rip through the sky’s swollen arteries
And unmake our batlike wings.” Bells snorted horseylike and
sons fell through infinite stairways, dead doves shot
from tessellations of double predestination,
foundation sacrifices and bull-
bellies inflamed with child-blood and orgies at harvest time
—but a spine which chains its notches to lust
and snapped baby skulls will break its neck
as innocent souls erupt from burial mounds
and God overturns Earth with His plow.
III.
The holy sun is heaven only to the poor.
The heat of Love is hellfire to the proud
who tumbled, wings dripping wax like dyed fruit,
as the heavens closed in—
and at the tower’s heights, its mirror glinted, reflecting
fields of bleeding tomatoes and strawberries.
Deep Heaven burst from their throats
shattered and split
so their jaws hung slack with gore hanging raw,
and their teeth scattered like Babel’s sound.
Then came the gong-cry from the heights:
My Spirit has always coursed between your skin.
You hung in space upon My Word alone;
only I can unmake.
Artist Statement:
Foundation sacrifices were a practice across multiple cultures in the ancient world, where children were entombed in the foundation of a building to ensure its stability. Child sacrifice has not ended — abortion still exists. We still are subject to the lie than stable civilizations can be built on a foundation of blood. This poem is a story of such a civilization, and how such civilizations end.
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