Moving

Friends, I am moving to a new blog location! I will now be posting the archive of poetry from this blog as well as new poetry to mixedmetonyms.wordpress.com so please go check it out!

Atiratu

Goddess par excellence, She who treads on the sea,

Mother of gods, of dawn and dusk, Queen of the heavens,
She who determines the day and is Mistress of the fates,

She made the earth fertile, a womb for all life, for every plant
and animal including ourselves, and even the destruction
of Her groves could not end Her worship.

Al-Manāt (مناة)

Fate, fortune, time, destiny -
She measures out all blessings;
She watches over life and death;
She metes out everything.
No pilgrimage is complete
without homage paid to Her;
though Her temple be destroyed,
still She measures and weighs all.

Asintmah

The First Woman was Midwife to the Mother Earth;
She wove Her a great blanket to cover Her girth;
To mouse, and rabbit, and all multitudes helped birth;
From the Mother and Midwife come all things of worth.

A Broken River

The water used to flow freely
as blowing breezes,
now interrupted, it stutters,
stops, pools.

An oxbow lake, though cut off
from its parent, may nonetheless
have its own currents,
still flows.

Broken, I might be -
we all are -
broken in, broken down, broken up.
Yet we continue, we fools.

I am nevertheless a river
with my own eddies and tides
(though changed from her former self,
she flows).

The Edge of Infinity

Zipping around the event horizon
of a black hole, Schwarzchild radius -
a gravitational field outside
a non-rotating, spherically symmetrical
body, a coordinate singularity
where the escape velocity
is precisely equal to the speed of light.
The edge of infinity is proportional
to the mass of the object in question,
and a black hole has a radius
smaller than that of Schwarzchild's solution.
Neither light nor particles can escape -
and the smaller black holes
have greater density than
their supermassive counterparts.
There is a supermassive black hole
at the galactic center of the Milky Way,
around which our galaxy rotates,
and an accretion of gasses in a disk
around it releases energy
powering a radio source
pulsing waves of wind and weird
and angelic choruses
interrupted by the croaks
of frogs and sirens wailing -
the universe hums along.

Al-ʻUzzā (العزى‎)

Goddess of love, protection, and might,
Whose sacred trees hold a ring of endless light,
Thou art bathed in beauty to our sight.

Sister to destiny and prosperity,
Triune but not interchangeably,
We offer our worship and sensuality.

Most exalted Lady, highest and most kind,
To Thee ever turns the hopeful and weary mind;
Under Thy gaze are lovers entwined.

Let us swear oaths in Thy holy name,
That in our failures none but ourselves are to blame,
But our successes only add to Thy worship and fame.

The garden of earthly delights is Thine own,
The grove of heavenly joy is Thine alone,
It is only through Thee that joy is ever known.