John Grace

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Start all the videos mute the atomic bombs and let the Abney Park music play. Abney Park is at the bottom Then read the poem below. Hopefully you have a monitor with high resolution settion so that you can get all of it in. JG.

PARADISE

We lived our lives in the pit.
A burrow of men women and children.
The halls smelt of diluted alcohol
and always there was the thrum- thrum
of the furnace in the walls, the floors,
sometimes a soft lullaby hummed
to me in sleep.

The elevator shaft was a vein of steel
one mile deep, a hundred paces wide,
that lead straight from topside down
into the burrow. I had never been topside before.
A small band, we were only three:
a pack mule bent with saddle bags,
a black lab with unclipped ears that sagged.
My Jacket, pants and shirt were sewn from
light cotton cloths. The loose fabric wiped
sweat from my skin as we rode the elevator
flat to the “up”

Just before I was chosen to leave the
pit, by the elevator seals
the priest crowned my head with both hands
and murmured a prayer with slow breath:
“All our hopes. May he return from his pilgrimage
with the prize. The chalice- the grail that we mightresurrect our land.
Then everyone below bellows:
“For the cup”
I had seen the ritual a half dozen times before;
my time to pass through the seals had come.
All the way up I heard their charge echo:
ForthecupForthecupForthecup.

The day the elders chose me to go
my father patted my shoulder.
His brown eyes were wet, but he
smiled shallowly.
“I’ve been topside in my dreams. It’s
beautiful, boy.

Father did not lie.
Long ago in our past,
atoms fused together and spawned beasts from hell.
Goblins named fireballs chased the crescent moon,
ate the night,
breathed hot breath on the nape of the land.
And kissed mother earth with salted lips.

40 megatons is the sun when it explodes.
The light welded the sand into a seamless
mirror. At night when our band walks over
the glass, the moon can be seen,
a reflection beneath our feet,
perfect
down to the “Plain of Archimedes.”
When the days are longest,
the rays bend. The glass glistens;
it has the sheen of an ocean.
So, wet I wish to dip my cup
for drink.

No it was not my father who told the lie.
The priest had said:
“That life up on the glass was wrong:
D.N.A. woven by God had been unraveled
by man.”
I looked over to my sis Sara,
who celebrated her eighth-birthday after
that Sunday’s mass.
Her hair was braided and coiled up in a bun.
My father’s fingers had locked her hair;
it had been a sparrows nest, knotted and tangled.
Father spun his big hands to weave her a raven.
Sara giggled each time his fingers
brushed through her braids.

Our trio ate lambs without knees.
They hobbled like grandfather leaned over his cane.
I have cracked eggs with paper thin shells and poured
a nose bleed.
I know how Adam must have felt when he broke the skin
on an apple with his teeth.
The glass took care of its own.
I hunted, roasted prey on a stick hung over
the dim coals of my waning fire at night.
Fat dripped into the flames and proved
the spirit of the flesh with fireworks
that danced like a swarm of fireflies over
the desert before going cold against the glass.
The aroma filled my mouth with saliva
My stomach spasmed in pangs.

At night after our band was fed under the
watchful eyes of “Orion the Hunter”
I opened my saddle bags
Pulled out bones
from carcasses past eaten:
ribs, vertebrae and femurs.
I polished them with peach pits;
picked at the decay with my blade.
I have carved a stem, a base,
and on a ewe’s skull I have etched a brim

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