The Call

I 

seek the compassion in her by night 

fear the wrath of her by day

find the answer in neither one

am the workings of her way

To long for me is to know me. 

When you came in search of me, when you travelled leagues and leagues for the mere mention of my doings, when it seemed I was there by your hearths, in your homes, and calling you out into the wilderness to find me all the same, it was me you paved your roads for, me you sought beyond the comfort of shelter.

When you built temples for me, and shrines, when you spent your precious time doing so, when it was love that you poured into every engraving, and you pondered over every delicate thing, as they were traces of me you longed to carve out of the elements, when others grew wary of your obsession with me, when they brought war to your doorstep and it failed to quench your thirst, it was me you murdered for and pillaged, me you asserted and imposed.

When you lost sight of me, when greed let you chase its tail, when mirages stole you away from my oasis, when you angered and grew bitter toward me, when you defiled the temples you built and desecrated the grounds you hallowed mine, when you indulged in fallow rituals and turned, in your blind rage, to the worship of old fallacies, called them undiscovered truths, it was me you saw in their waning faces, me you regained in their brightest moments, in my weakest form, me you buried in the deepest layers that your memories would allow, only to return, with the same fervour, to tear down what was built above, and dig frantically, with the same zeal, for that which yearning and forgotten lay below.

Through your writings, your findings, through ceaseless curiosity, by means of deep delusions. Over troubled waters, in the dense fog that dulls the attention. Voicing your reflections, sending them into the crowds as a hail of arrows, to pierce tentative hearts, to plough through the sober-minded. Me you hoisted high into the wind above your heads. Me you pray to and pray to catch.

Only when the last page is written will I be caught. Caught and abandoned. But mine is a hiding spot on that horizon which cannot be. I elude the restless, I am the beacon that guides them, the constellation leading them astray. I beseech them, for at dawn I am the crying child, at dusk the dying words. 

The plea, the persecutor, yes, but sanctuary to your sleepless nights.