Roof and the moon in a deep chatting session
Bare tree filling with the flood of jasmine
Clouds joining from Mesopotamian rivers
Two horses attempting to break loose
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September 9, 2025
Categories:
mesopotamian, image, imagery, metaphor, moon,
Form: Free verse
The Mesopotamians,
The birthplace of writing, building the ziggurats and palaces.
The Greeks,
Warriors and philosophers, diverse in their ways of thinking.
The Romans,
Masters of conquests and destruction.
The Egyptians,
With creative minds and architectural prowess.
All are different and diverse.
But they still all believe that they are the one.
They believe that they are the protagonists of our world.
Portraying their stories in their own immaculate light,
Shining in their versions of stories mixed with lies,
As the centre and hero of the story.
Categories:
mesopotamian, conflict,
Form: Free verse
On site of this forgotten Babylon
What powerful but unrecorded race
Once dwelt in this annihilated place
What strange creature’s kin
to inhuman race
Dwell deep in antediluvian hells
Uncanny things creep
and scurry in forgotten realms
where Poseidon reigns in dark
crumbling cathedrals built
to worship cryptic gods from
outer voids darkest empires
What hell is this of undiscovered divinities
Babylon burns as nations
of man conspiring to touch
the face of an imperfect god
sink to depths deeper undefined
What afterbirth of leviathan
hide in secret chambers
plot damnation to human minds
insanities spawn monstrosities
that doom mens soul and break their realities
In sight of this forgotten Babylon
Along a desolate Mesopotamian shore
What powerful unrecorded species
dwell with in this annihilated place
Where strange creatures akin
to the human race
Dwell deep in antediluvian hells
Ode to Lovecraftian lore…
Categories:
mesopotamian, allah, allegory, allusion, analogy,
Form: Free verse
Museums are quiet except
For crackling parquet floors,
Wooden squares, a game board:
Checkers or maybe chess
Of various right angle, grain striations.
Parallel to paintings in oil, red lines
Begin a court for pickup basketball.
But whether subjects of famous battles
Or romances between animals and gods,
They are stuck in a frozen frame moment
Like mammoths in some La Brea Art Pit
It is this instant we are to see anew
Each brush stroke, a wisp of hair,
A dab of white, a cloud condensing,
I lean close.
An unseen alarm makes a statue come alive,
A funerary, votive docent who guards
Mesopotamian and Egyptian antiquities.
She curses me in hieroglyphs translated
And dictated from an Old Kingdom tongue.
My crime: too close to art.
As if my admission, and apology
Were not punishment enough.
I could have cast my eyes
At strangers surrounding me.
Vatican visitors are permitted
To touch the Pieta statue for luck.
Suspecting it has only so many
Touches before marble succumbs,
It’s luckier not to take a chance. (1/30/02)
Categories:
mesopotamian, art, feelings, humanity, philosophy,
Form: Free verse
Carved in stone (sonnet to Ishtar)
Hail beauty, still as death, in smooth stone hewn,
The Great Earth's Queen in regal posture stands,
Who in the underworld sings out her tune
Of justice, law and power o'er her lands.
The land of Kur, the realm of all the dead
Is her domain. With eagle wings and claws
And serpent hair entwined about her head,
Athene's owls are there to give just cause.
She rules supreme, in nakedness and pride
On lions' backs her feet grip with sharp hold,
Four thousand years an image petrified
Her regal glare still dreadful to behold.
Carved in stone, as Queen of night she reigns
O'er gardens of the fertile crescent's plains.
I was inspired to write this poem after visiting the 'I am Azurbanipal' exhibition in the British Museum. One of the exhibits, a stone relief of the goddess Ishtar, the deity associated in Mesopotamian mythology with love, sex, death and war, displayed carving of startling clarity and beauty even though it was made around 4000 years ago in ancient Babylon.
Categories:
mesopotamian, culture, fire, god, history,
Form: Sonnet
Terracotta oil lamp, nearly two millennia balanced in the palm of my hand
An archaic flashlight for some Mesopotamian householder
Hands over centuries transferring it from one owner to the next
And to think that in its newest state, a sleepy flame from its spout
Cast a glow upon a bed, a table, a wife’s face, a scroll or a book
Illuminating the momentary life that burns faster than oil.
Categories:
mesopotamian, history, home, life, light,
Form: Free verse
Along the memory lane,
Walking, Neolithic Mesopotamians!
A potter pioneering the first wheel stone,
The wooden wheels under the chariots rolling down!
The Wheel rolling up and down endorsing circle of life!
Accelerating the pace time to time!
The invention of wheel,
An innovation of mobility,
Like the planets,
Computer disk on desk,
The plastic wheel of IT era,
A solar symbol rotating technology!
Wheel,
The wisdom of all time in the direction of civilization,
Simply from minds of Neolithic men,
Wheel,a vehicle,
Travelled from the forgotten Mesopotamia-
A village deemed of Globe,
To the unseen Global village,
An adventure to reach any time,any where!
Wheel,
Took the burden of feet to it's shoulders,
If not wheels,
Wings,the answer is the question!
Where?
Digging the layers of layers of wounded Mesopotamian soil,
Tracing the resting soul,
The pioneering potter,
To offer his long pending royalty!
Categories:
mesopotamian, community, feelings, imagination, journey,
Form: Verse
My mind is euphoric from scenes historic
Assyrian chariots innovative wheels bristling Mesopotamian plains
Paring the ranks of each, dated infantry formation
In Greece, anesthetizing anvil of the Dorian invasion
Glorious bronze relics supplanted by cheaper iron distillation
Persian armies: Greek hoplites, Scythian archers; mercenary aggrandization
Shrinking rebel hordes in Asia Minor's wars of attrition
The venal nature of imperial Rome's persuasion
Crucifying a few, targeted rebels for cultural ingratiation
Devout, gentile Europeans crusading to Biblical heritage's door
Defacing cross with predations in route, arriving uplifting banner 'gainst infidel Moor
Normans in hordes splashing across the chilly, English channel tides
Under William the Conqueror's mantra, bridging the Anglo-Saxon divide
Categories:
mesopotamian, history
Form: Rhyme
Lego Cities
Square blocked infrastructures formed from a meddling mind
engineered and fused together with sticky grape popsicle fingers
the Lego Babylon rises with its hanging gardens
strewn along the carpet floor.
A Mesopotamian oasis of multi-colored plastic struts
carelessly scattered for archeologists to decipher.
All those strange cuneiform residues of fingerprints
left by the sugar filled deity who set them in place.
Catalyst of that industrial architect
whose cubicle fortress of a daydreaming metropolis
sits in the corner of the living room
awaiting its devastation from future gods
armed with vacuums and nap times.
nathan martin 2009
Categories:
mesopotamian, childhood,
Form: Light Verse
Translucent circles drawn around
ancient Mesopotamian faces
we're told are halos', even though
Christian saints had yet to exist and
those same spheres now look like astronaut helmets.
Hieroglyphics are translated by Europeans
into a perpetration of their ideals about kings
who must have ruled over Aztec men.
Yet these glyphs show men winged in flight
with symbols and knowledge of the heavens,
(unknown to European minds of their day)
which are dismissed as myth.
Pyramids and ancient cities
alike in size and scope,
are separated by oceans,
were unseen by their builders who could
not have lived to see them completed,
yet we are told they were created as crypts.
Ancient Negroid featured monoliths of
a stone not found near the jungles
in which they sit, show their
African faces in an area of the world
not known to have harbored Africans.
Science wants always to categorize,
explain within an earth-bound framework,
waiting to stigmitize ideas
of other beings from other worlds
having ever contributed
to the story of our world
and all its mystery.
Categories:
mesopotamian, mystery
Form: Narrative