Anasazi Poem by gershon hepner

They used to think that it was drought
that drove the Anasazi out
of southwest cities on the mesas,
to die there, like forgotten races.
We still don’t understand the basis
of their departure without traces,
though many tried hard to discover
what happened and what made them suffer;
their lights went out, their end was sudden,
the Anasazi sheep were mutton.
Though we don’t know, we speculate,
and, curious, ask what was the date
when, flames extinguished, they all ran
on empty to the final man?

On Anasazi fell no rain.
No man or woman could remain
where many centuries they’d sojourned
before by blasted climate bludgeoned.
First came the hunger, then the thirst,
women, children dying first,
then after that expiring men,
though we don’t know precisely when.
(Of course it’s guesswork in the main,
except the absence of the rain.)
Skies were cloudless and the rivers
died as dehydrated slivers
that etched the ground where flowing water
once ran throughout the southwest quarter.
Life departed, no companions
in the Arizona canyons.
No more streams or maize or orchards,
population cracked like potsherds
scattered to this day on mesas,
museum quality the traces,
most outstanding pottery
by losers of life’s lottery,
expelled (not by Athenian lots) ,
devoid of life as broken pots,
transformed from haves into have-nots,
sans tombstones and sans burial plots.

If cause of death was not external
that brought them to an end infernal,
perhaps some fights internecine
consumed them like a furnace in
societies erstwhile pacific.
Yet there’s no evidence specific
that they once hunted men like falcons,
as Serbs once did, when in the Balkans
they hunted Muslims whom they’d martyr,
ignoring Rights of Humans charter,
men and women, babies even,
genocidal, unGenevan.
When Nazis ruled, how many Germans
wrote pamphlets or delivered sermons,
or spoke out bravely to oppose
the horrors of the World War woes;
men died like cattle, shorn of hope,
ignored by President and Pope,
six million Jews allowed to perish.
The Anasazis’ death, less garish,
provides us with no evidence
of acts like these whose consequence
might offer us an explanation
for their occult extermination.

Perhaps with crisis of the spirit
Anasazis all were wearied,
putting faith in dolls, kachinas,
which, by trusting minds, were seen as
alternatives to gods, since they
were thought to have a kinder way
about them, showing more concern
than gods who, like the Comintern,
were merely on a power trip.
They found the dolls were far more hip
and, when handled, far more pleasant
than gods who, although omnipresent,
seemed like the priests to be evasive
and, bottom line, quite unpersuasive
compared with dolls which seemed to smile,
quite genuine though juvenile,
not false and past their prime as were
the ancient gods in their hauteur,
but reasonable and sociable,
regarding as negotiable
all problems that, environmental,
the gods ignored as accidental,
responsibility refusing
for water loss, themselves recusing.

Because the gods had failed, most folk
now put their faith in dolls––no joke!
It’s said that real men do not play
with dolls, but these men used to pray
to them, when told: “Repent, adore
kachinas, for they offer more
than former gods, who’re old and tired––
kachinas are far more inspired,
and helpful: they don’t bear a grudge,
and, more importantly, don’t judge! ”
They prayed to dolls to send them water,
and irrigate this southwest quarter.
Perhaps, abandoning their gods
brought them a respite against odds,
though once they’d lost their gods in heaven
they lost their chance of breaking even.

Though old men with kachinas played,
they didn’t love them; while they prayed
to them, and hoped that they’d respond,
of puppets they weren’t really fond.
They clung to old gods they’d deserted.
If rain fortuitously squirted
from heavens, they would praise kachinas,
but found hypocrisy most heinous,
and hated their capitulation
to feigned kachina adoration.
For with hypocrisy came quibbles,
once drinking water slowed to dribbles,
downplaying help the dolls provided,
a provenance that they derided.
Enfeebled by their faithless folly
that caused them to adopt a dolly,
dispirited, they slowly perished,
still pining for the gods they’d cherished.

They should have listened from their kiva
to words once spoken by Akiva,
who loved his God till death although
He’d made His brimstone lava-flow.
While Romans singed him like a coal,
he concentrated on his soul,
and, dying said: “Shema, oh hear
how God to me is always dear.
Although He takes my life from me
I won’t turn to apostasy.”
They gained so little, Anasazis,
their Reich as fragile as the Nazis’,
who, like them, gave up on their God
while hunting in a brownshirt squad,
until with hubris they succumbed
when God his finger at them thumbed
and made them disappear forever.
Were Anasazi like this, ever,
not cruel, I mean, but doomed to fall
because they had no gods at all?

Your guess is quite as good as mine!
Say, what’s your poison? Mine is wine.
Drinking helps me to forget
that God’s forgotten me, and yet
it dulls the pain, for I remember
the snows that come back in December
to whiten paths that, autumn bloodied
with leaves that orange, red and muddied,
clothe frozen ground like colored pelts.
Every year this same snow melts
quite imperceptibly in spring,
when all young creatures have a fling,
and most, forgetting yesterday,
believe that there’s still time to play
a haunting theme, like Harry Lyme,
in music or with prose or rhyme,
that calls all lovers hither, thither,
unaware that they will wither.
As hair that’s lost on heads turned bald,
forgotten, God can’t be recalled;
Unlike the seasons of the year
that come back every year, God-fear
is disappearing. On the grounds
where He once walked he does no rounds,
a doctor who has lost his patience
with Jews and all the other nations.

Visible on no soul screen,
I’ll go where I have never been,
not, Anasazi, to betray
my God, although my hair is grey.
In winter, when my pots are broken,
I’ll tell my friends, who’ll think I’m joking:
“Be true to God, though He throws low balls––
and in the winter play with snowballs,
and after snow melts, don’t forget
how, costumed as a fair coquette,
the spring will blossom, and the flowers
will follow, blooming, April showers,
and colors that are less than sober
begin in fall by mid-October.
So sing in perfect harmony
a Benedictus Domine
to God who is the only Caster
of lots that make him blessed Master
of destinies. Though He won’t come
for blessings, we must all succumb,
not treating friends worse than a brother,
or changing Him for any other,
not even for a moment, quasi,
as happened to the Anasazi.

My friends will say: “You joke! ” and think
my lights must be out on the blink.
But only when we make this link
can we aspire to hoodwink
the gods who don’t control the planet,
though some believe that they began it
and for millennia even ran it,
and worshipped them in wood and granite.
The world is threatened now with doom,
and even gods who, we assume,
do not exist, will not relume
the buried light man can’t exhume,
nor Mother Nature, who now grieves
about the carbon prints he leaves
behind, and selfishly bereaves
the earth, while he no more believes.

9/2/96,5/11/07