TIAMAT

If you look as if you tip well your guide
May point to a shadow in the corner
Of the Kraken's dream. "That's Tiamat,"
He'll say, "saltwater goddess and dragon.
Last seen in reality 1700 years ago
In Antioch, swallowing St. Margaret.
She's apologized many times for that
But Antiochene saints bear grudges
So Tiamat deems it prudent to live here
Outside the lawful realms. Leave her something --
A bead will do, or a key or a feather --
And chaos, I've heard, will be your friend."

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.