The Master’s Exhortation to the Sons of Dawn
The Words of Moses
Harvesting
The Book of Mysteries
Purities
Purities
A Liturgical Work
The Community Rule
Process

 

The Master’s Exhortation to the Sons of Dawn

 

 

 

                                                               hear, who love

                                                    the end of ages

                                                                  ancient things to know
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The Words of Moses

 

 

 

 

into their ears all that I

witness

 

the earth

 

abandon

their horrors

 

blow

                olives

 

forget what I

and length of days

 

all these words

carefully for

 

your own sakes

harvest
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Harvesting

 

 

 

 

                     gather these figs and pomegranates

             if olives in the

                       olive press open
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The Book of Mysteries

 

 

 

 

prophecy

the author of all

 

the riddle is sealed

the root open

 

all your wisdom

hidden riddle hold
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Purities

 

 

 

 

the pupil of his eye

 

the fruit’s

 

vessel which has a seal

 

any earthen vessel
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Purities

 

 

 

 

dwell in isolation

at a distance, in the wing

 

to this measure

bathe in water, eat

 

wash with the pure

long-term issue of blood

 

reckoned as a flux

bathe in water

 

wash, eat
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A Liturgical Work

 

 

 

 

each soul cling

 

dwelling between light and

 

darkness by means of the

 

inscrutable light
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The Community Rule

 

 

 

 

of light, of darkness

the Covenant

 

shall cling apart

 

the Covenant seeking the ways of

light looks towards darkness

 

two spirits sprung

 

concealment

in unending light

 

fire of the dark regions

 

remnant

between divisions

 

a binding oath

 

as it is written

wherever they dwell
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Process

 

     These poems are words gathered or gleaned from the Dead Sea Scrolls, the ancient library discovered in caves near the Dead Sea: words hidden, unread, for 2,000 years. These poems belong to a longer series that has no title of its own but that will be placed alongside other poems in a manuscript tentatively called א. Time has taken care of the scrolls; time has winnowed them. What remains is not simply what is extant, but the delicate structure of the scrolls’ dark matter, too; what remains is also what has been rendered by time invisible. I, a reader, have not come to winnow further, but to gather of what I can and cannot see. Perhaps I am working with the strange prophetic consciousness asleep in any one thing, perhaps with old light that has traveled a while to reach us.

 

     Since I could not work directly with the Hebrew language, the words of these poems are taken from the English translation by Geza Vermes in the Penguin Classics edition of 2004. I have kept, also, to the order in which the words appear in a given text. The spaces between words is sometimes close, sometimes pages, or columns apart. This often depends on the size of the “original” text—whether small of its own, a fragment of a larger, missing body, or a scroll that has survived pretty much intact. Whether near or far, I have gathered the words into my own ear for the lyric poem. The titles of the individual poems are those that scholars have given to the individual texts, as Vermes has here in his translation called them. (“The Book of Mysteries,” however, is by J. T. Milik. Vermes notes this and calls the same few fragments, “The Triumph of Righteousness or Mysteries.”) Later poems in this series move into the realm of hymn and psalm. These are some of the earliest poems in the series.

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Tirzah Goldenberg is an MFA candidate at Colorado State University.

 Posted by at 6:44 pm