The Eleventh Commandment

The Flood

It rained upon us cats 

And rained upon us dogs,

For two score days

Until it stopped. 

And together with forty

Torrential nights,

The land we knew

Was lost to sight.

And all we’d known

Was drowned to death,

No one was left to breathe

The breath,

Of life that lives for 

This consciousness,

To explore itself –

No more, no less.

The Eleventh Commandment

The words mumbled by men

Awaiting their death,

Filled the smouldering air

With their final breaths,

They had given their all;

Their guts lay by their side

And they remembered 

The triumphs of their truths 

And the times they had lied.

As the bombs and the bullets

Screamed over heads,

Severed from shoulders

Amongst silenced arms 

And broken legs.

Now Ten Commandments clashed

With the orders of the King,

As the dead lay dying

Under a cacophony of sin,

And they considered conscription 

And their own free will

And the fifth commandment –

Thou shalt not kill.

From Then ‘til Now

Imagine, an outburst

Of consciousness!

Like magic,

Alive and spontaneous.

Like a chimpanzee being

Hit, by lightening 

From above;

It now understands 

Compassion and Love.

The first of our kind;

Parents, Adam and Eve,

Who ushered in an age

That now

Seems hard to conceive.

The age of temptation,

For that’s why we’re here-

To realise that our desires 

Are all built on fears.

Then came the Sons,

Named and numbered,

Long lived, like the Rishis

And as unencumbered.

With duties to teach

And to guide and to see

The future unfold

To give a chance

To see.

None of them did,

And so it rained

And rained, and drowned

The sorrows of those

Who’d pained, and

Had stolen the sun 

From the hearts of men

Who were intended to be

Brothers, sisters, friends.

Then came the chance,

The Arc and salvation,

But again they failed

In their obligation.

And so they built a tower

To look God

In the eye;

One so tall

That it pierced the sky.

And deafened so the ears

Of the heavens above,

That they were cursed

With a gift of languages-

And all that that does;

Communication breakdowns,

Arguments and divorce,

Familiar families fracture

With neither memory nor remorse.

From which sprung

The civilisations 

That we were taught to know;

Sumer and Babylon,

Greece and Rome.

All would rise

And all would fall

By the wayside of our history,

Rewritten to enthral. 

The laws of Manu, Moses et al,

Were manipulated without mercy

And mocked by the mob,

Until neither who was who

And from where they came,

Was known to themselves 

Nor to the scribes with name.

Who rewrote verses to blind the eye

Of searching souls like you and I.

And to distract us

From the reality

Of why we are here?

To pass this time –

That may well be years.

To take the chance

And to see that our mind

Has been in our heart 

All of this time.