Templars
Once merged with all mankind in golden idyll,
For eons now we orbit exile’s cycle.
We live two fevers in the same proud fashion:
The rose’s passion, and the cross’s Passion.
In dark’s bleak hush, we tame the weaving talons
Of Norns and tilt the cataclysmic balance.
Our weapons, flagellating crowd and crown,
Thunder a twittering generation down.
Take back your tome of rules, that cardboard anchor.
We shrug your side-glance off, its trustless rancour,
Its hate that turns to panic as it crashes
Against love’s exorcizing lightning flashes.
Our gold? – with slash and catapult we plunder
Established trash for our contempt to squander.
Our justice? – while men flee its white-hot anger,
We kneel before an infant in a manger.
That unslicked hair, that arson of the eyes
Which once revealed the lord in rags’ disguise
We’re veiling from the rabble’s pushy homage;
Our shade, not us they deck with showy plumage.
The lap that mothered us was not our mother’s.
The loins our heirs will spurt from are another’s.
Such stock – adopted sons, adopted sires –
Outlasts, outglows mere copulated fires.
And every brazen deed and every fated
Crossroads is ours alone who consummate it.
“Save us”, men beg. We save them. Our reward:
They stone us, shouting “Curse what you have wrought”.
When Magna Mater deserts from nurturing
And thirsts exhausted for life’s buried spring
In universal night, then only one
Who always fought her and her law of spawn
Can grab her braids, can grip her fingers tight
Until she re-enacts her age-old rite
Where freely she – look quick, where two worlds mesh,
What flesh writhes up from god, what god from flesh?
Translated by Peter Viereck
Page(s) 247-248
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