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.
Tirzah Goldenberg is an MFA candidate at Colorado State University.