LUCIFER: THE OFFICIAL VERSION OF HIS FALL
Lucifer once ruled the nations
Till, raddled with perverted notions
He thought to ask God’s circling stars
To form a flight of gentle stairs
By which he’d scale the heavenly throne,
Defile it with the rebel stain.
He’d dominate the Mount of Meeting
And silence God’s eternal shouting,
Reign a prince in his new birth
Over the outermost poles of the north.
He swore to reach the cloudy peak
And strut on it in God’s bright cloak.
He’d speak like God and spout His name
And wave his arms like wings of flame.
He’d rule with cataracts of words,
Keep order among lesser lords;
A universe with rhyme and reason
Would be a mayhem of confusion:
Lucifer control by pride
The gorgeous chaos he bestrode.
But God was neither drunk nor blind
To what Cosmogony had planned.
In his Omnipotence he froze
Restless Lucifer’s swirling eyes,
Sent a hundred thousand stars
Hornet-buzzing in vast rays
To drive him mad who thought to try
And take the place of the Most High.
They pinioned him, then made him fall
To the utter depths of Hell.
They tangled him and brought him low.
United Zodiac foresaw
That Lucifer in peace or war
Would be no blessing to their realm.
Faces spurned his rending groan:
Four-point body wheeled and spun
Across the Wilderness of Sin
And struck the cinder of the Sun:
Eternity breeds evolution
And drinks the blood of Revolution.
Declaiming innocence of guile
Yet burned clean of the martyr’s role
Lucifer in haughty rancour –
Spewing fire through milky groves –
Condemned the heart of God to canker
And all his satellites as slaves.
Pleas and questions he ignored
In order that the final word
Should stay with him; and then he’d rove
To search for burial and love.
LUCIFER TURNED
Lucifer turned to God and said:
You want my heart, you want my head.
In giving both I’d be your slave.
If only one, I’d bleed to death.
They are as inseparable as breath
That, coming from my mouth, meets ice
And on the stillest air makes smoke.
God did not speak. He never spoke.
Others had to work his throat
And shape such words in their own voice
That God, by silence, made his choice.
But only Lucifer used verse
To save his heart, to save his head –
And still God did not speak or curse
But, spewing cataclysmic gall
Condemned grand Lucifer to fall.
LUCIFER’S DECISION
Lucifer slept but once
On the journey south,
For in the morning had to decide
Whether, having crossed the river,
And said goodbye to God
When no more dogs were barking
Nor hut smoke could be seen
Nor any voices heard,
Whether to take the left
Or right arm of the road.
Best not to stop, not think of warmth
But lunge without thought to left or right.
Either that, or broach the centre –
A wilderness of granite-green –
In which one lived as long
And learned far more
Than after the exhaustion of a quick decision
Or the utter ruin of a right one.
UNITY
Memorials being sacred
God made a star of Lucifer
Launched the brilliant morning star
That suited navigators best.
God being what he is
He made another star
The first star of evening
That all women blessed.
They were the hinges of the sky
And never met. One chased,
The other followed. Who did what
Was impossible to test.
Neither wondered who began it,
Trapped as they were, and are,
In the same planet.
NIMROD AND LUCIFER
No one knew why Nimrod shot at the sky.
Such emptiness worked his arms
And sent each arrow whining
Its steep incline at God’s power.
Nimrod is a mighty hunter, said the Lord.
Spring was gone. Adonis gored, already
In his furrow, sorrow forgotten,
Wheat whitening a plain too hot for dreams,
The sky blue, God invisible, day vacant,
Animals hiding from the sun.
Lucifer steered each iron point,
But Nimrod was a man, not God:
No feral tip could reach its mark,
Though Mighty Nimrod, wanting God to die,
Wondered why God wasn’t dead
And why the arrow fell back from the sky
Anointed with red from notch to tip.
Nimrod wept for shame on seeing
Lucifer’s left foot was lame.
THE ‘JOB’
The three-decker wooden ship broke its ropes,
Each impacted fibre torn by cobalt water
Lifting its tall stern;
Grating the granite quay
The ship was loose in storm-fists
And no safe harbour locked its arms.
Refuge was in the fang-teeth of the gale
The horizonless ocean
Wood against water
Sails in salty phosphorescence
Mainmast an impaling spike.
The merciless twisting left a hulk
Which Lucifer could not drown:
Not possible for him to know
What made that scabby coffin stay afloat,
Find an unending mirror of water
And merit in God’s eye for its long fight.
LUCIFER AND EMPEDOCLES
Progress is an orphan:
Throw a crust it starves to death.
Give it a golden cloak,
A hundred thousand people turn to ash.
Progress either snivels or it kills:
Who owns it holds a sun to limping Lucifer
Who vowed God’s rebels harnessed his effulgence
And made galactic storms.
Progress will be the death of me, said God.
Let me turn the notion on its head.
God said: ‘Empedocles, say this:
“Progress is the bitch of war;
Love and discord suckle it.
For once I’ll speak plain:
War gets the world nearer to death,
Does no one good.
No sane man cares to die a king,
Or idiot become a god.”’