"Goddess of Paradox"

 Behold now
 Everything on this earth;
 The fields with abundance of grain,
 Palm-grove harvests rich and fruitful,
 The forests that separate kingdoms,
 The fires that smite them;
 The brickwork of ancestries and the towers that reach our gods.
 Behold these crop-fields
 That we call life and death,
 Grown on the back of a sludge-like entity
 Sowed, and heaped, in granaries of self-doubt;
 Collected by children's dirty hands;
 Bronze-sickles, charcoal-eyes
 Have swept these homes and huts of clay
 As inimical as they are beloved;
 A mother's love for the murderous son
 Is as complex as the children's dependence
 On these fearsome steppes.

 Behold now
 Everything on this earth;
 The countenance of the origin-beast
 Carved in the mountains of the north
 And the efflux of her genitals
 Streaming to the south of the marshes
 Into that great ocean
 Whose shores we only know by myth
 And whose waters
 Is the abode of the primordial one,
 Whom hurls the long-spear of flood and storm
 Deep into the sides of these lands -
 For these lands are hers:
 When all comes about,
 Has not the lands risen strongly
 From her bottomless and abysmal womb?
 Has not the pleasure that shook
 The members of the old, old gods
 Into ejaculation 
 Been ridden sensually by her scaled loins?
 Is she not the temple to which all sacrifices are offered,
 All libations put forth:
 Is she not the shrine; the rite; the lighthouse emitting darkness;
 Is she not the stele
 Inscribed with all words of grace,
 And the eloquence of our beautiful poets? -
 She is the divine inspiration
 That evokes suicide and resentment, and confusion.
 She swallows whole fleets into maelstroms; whirls of chaos.
 She is what we feel when we want to die
 For no apparent reason -
 She is what we feel when we want to die
 For all the greatest, most noble, of reasons.
 She is what we act when we want to strike a fire
 In the farmlands of our own fertile fields.

 Over the lapse of a thousand millenias,
 From the bottom of the darkest abyss,
 She has been constricting the gods of the heavens
 In strong leather nooses,
 For is not void original to all;
 Chaos, discord, original to order?
 Thus she is the first.
 Great Inanna knew better,
 Than to question the rites of the netherworld;
 She confronted them, took part in them,
 And arose as the warrioress
 We know her as today.