Homecoming by Gebra Kristos Desta.

Heaven's Gone

All the King's men know that heaven's gone.

This is the line that woke me. Woke me? I'm not certain
that I was awake. I stirred from bed, walked to paper.
It was as though an old friend, one I thought had gone
travelling and would never return, had poked his head
around the corner of my bedroom door and whispered
the news to me.

All the King's men know that heaven's gone.

When first I wrote it down, I spelled king in lower case,
no capital. I later remade the K into a capital letter,
a clearer meaning, a sharper image. Kristos?

The next lines came in a tangle that I had to untie. In the
beginning, Egypt was mentioned, and I had used the word
Christian where Jesus would suffice.

Who is this old friend that visits? Why is it he laughs as though
his belly is filled with a ring of lost and rusted keys? When he
smiles - and he smiles often - you no longer see his eyes.

Before there was a Jesus
There was no one on the cross
It symbolized the moment when
The spirit entered us
There was a God in Africa
As old as any sun
His body now a cave of bone
A lonely skeleton

Heaven's gone
All the King's men know that
Heaven's gone

Would you like to be stirred from sleep, driven to paper,
instructed to write such lines? I suppose that I ought to
be grateful. Be happy, a friend writes, worried that I am
splitting into pieces under the weight of despair. I never
trusted happiness. Robert Duval's character said that, in
Tender Mercies, remember? It was after he'd learned
that his daughter had died in a car accident. He was madly
hoeing in the garden and his wife came out to comfort him.
He said to her, "I never trusted happiness. I never did,
and never will." I know that he was emotional at the time,
but I took his wisdom to be deeper than the feeling.

Happiness? Despair is useful, I think. It's depression that
I am concerned about. To despair, your feelings must be
in motion. Depression requires stasis. Despair is a river,
depression more of a pond. I picture algae on the water's
skin. When the friend writes to say, "Be happy," I hold
her wish in my arms. But I wonder, in reflection, what
leads anyone to believe in happiness, let alone to trust it?
I've known it, and it's a good song, but I wouldn't want to
sing it all the time, at least not as it is presently written. I
don't trust it, you see. I think it cheapens us in some way
if we're not able to join the wound of the human race. Is
that what I mean to say? I think too much happiness can
lead you to forget. Isn't forgetting a loss of self? Kundera,
in The Book Of Laughter And Forgetting, said that tyrants
and fascists depended on citizens laughing and forgetting.
I remember: I agreed with him when I read it.

I went looking just now for a thumb-smoothed rock,
wanting to hold its heaviness in my palm. I had a flutter,
remembering that last summer I gave it to Cowboy as a
gift in Austin. So I imagined it in my palm instead, round
roughness of its backside, smooth flatness of its underbelly,
rubbed smooth by the thumbs of men who were unafraid
to go down. This stone was the talking stick we used in a
men's circle for many years. You held it when it was your
turn to share something true, to take your voice toward a
secret, to open a feeling that had closed. The smoothness
is evidence of witness, of lives changing.

In the verse above, where it reads "There was a God in
Africa," I wonder...did a conscious moment enter? I have,
in the way of so many, been haunted and shaken by news
of Africa, the world's failure to be summoned to its emergency
in sufficient numbers with the needed food and medicine.
The image of a skeleton, a cave of bone, the remains - perhaps
it is a symbol both ancient and contemporary.

The departure of the faithful
The doorway open wide
The ruling house rebuilt so small
The gospel is denied
The traffic moves away from us
The wine spills from the cup
No light or thunder in the sky
So why should we look up

Heaven's gone
All the King's men know that
Heaven's gone

It was four in the morning when I wrote this down, and
when I read it after sleeping again I said to myself, who
would want to read such a thing? Is it sadness? I know
that some of my writing over the past years, especially
since the 2000 election in the United States, has come to
question the use and misuse of the name of God, not only
in the stealing of meaning from people's spiritual experience
but also in covering atrocities.

The departure of the faithful. I saw lines of people moving
slowly away from the worship place. There were many of
them, and they could no longer fit in this church. It had
become too small. They are looking down. Judging by their
posture and slow steps, I think they must have believed
that their God was inside that building, more than he was
inside their bodies. I want to whisper something to them.

Before there was a Jesus / There was no one on the cross

If I write a third verse, from a different mixture of chronos
and kairos, in which place and era will it begin? Will the pre-
Christian pagan origins have a place in this song? What do
I want from this last verse? I want it to sink into the soil,
or appear to, like the sun.

In the ritual of day and night
The sun becomes the crown
The King will rise, the King will fall
The sun go sinking down
A symbol on an ancient grave
A prayer preserved in dust
The gospel of old Egypt
The water and the rust

Heaven's gone
Do the King's men even know if
Heaven's gone

I hear a wheel that needs water, its sound the kind you
hear inside your body when you haven't moved in a while
and the joints cry. It's an old wheel. I may have to bring
it into the song one day, if I can only get it turning. If I am
able to sing, somehow, in a magic and comprehensible way
of the powers of allegory and myth, then I will bring that
rusted wheel under the spill and spell of water. For now,
I continue hoeing in the garden, with more questions than
answers, watching feelings come and go. In my sleep, I walk
still from pillow to paper, moving in the direction of the lost
and gleaming keys.

DL

Gebra Kristos Desta's artwork used by permission