Anadromous Poem by Linda Hepner

A Fable of the Anadromous


Too young they travelled in their mother's arms

to far off places where the air was free,

and grew like puppies deaf to war that harms

and sure their lives would flourish by decree


of rational man and mores. Then one day

the mirror told them they were puny, dark;

they blamed their mother, asking, Where’s our pa?

and when she heard their constant question mark


she told them, “In the past, where honey grows,

and sainted ancestors sleep in the sod.”

They upped and left her garden: yes, youth flows,

abandoning a mother’s choice of god.


They travelled without arms to zones of war;

they found their father, fighting, bold and scarred;

they chose the god they had suspected bore

the right to godly Right, no other yard


the one they’d play in. They put on their arms,

and armed with Right, they grew and travelled back

to where they’d grown, far from the fire that harms,

and planned a fine surprise, a bold attack




upon the mirror and their mother, who

distorted what was fine, paternal, right,

worth dying for - said Wise Ones - true,

no longer darkened by her foreign light.


They gathered all their toys, their books, their friends,

they heaped them in their garden, lit a fire,

and made a bonfire that would surely cleanse

the garden of each clytemnestral liar


and exploded all the rational men and more,

their godless ideas, pleasures, knowledge, art

and naked nature, faults and risks, the store

of man’s inquiries, for inside the heart


god cannot be if mankind breaks the laws

he’s found in revolution, with the shout

of violent un-creation, and the jaws

of death will spare the man who will not doubt.


LRH
4.24.13