One thing about Mot

I had a mind to write something about Lancelot, grown restless in death, but instead I came up with a poem about one of the more dour gods of Babylonia. It’s an odd process, this writing business, at least for me:

Had you met me in my power

You would not have rejoiced.

God of the drought was I, of dry fields

Baking under uncaring suns

Mot I was called and Death

Was pleased enough to call me kin.

(Skeletons all look alike and who

To say we were not brothers?)

I had some priests – unpleasant men

Though my worshippers were worse

Praying that I would make fallow

The fields of others. (Many died; wheat,

For those with silos fill, sold high.)

After he killed great Tiamat, Marduk,

Who did not like the desert, came after me

Bellowing, waving his sword. Seven months I ran;

They built a shrine where he caught me.

What good to be a god when Marduk

Leaves you broken in the dust?

If year by year the sands creep towards the City

Do not curse Mot; the drought

Has found itself another god.

(Find, if you can, another Marduk).

          Mot turns up, so far as I know, only in stories about his being slain by Marduk or by Ba’al, though this may have happened more than once (some argue it was a yearly event; it probably wasn’t one Mot looked forward to with any eagerness). I’m still trying to figure out why he came when I was looking for Lancelot. Perhaps they room together in the afterworld.

I am oddly fond of Mot, who makes no pretenses about things. I have a story about him somewhere.