All language subtitles for NTLive Salome a new play by Yeal Farber (sp) 2017

It begins at the end

For I am the first and the last

The honoured one and the scorned

The coming together and the falling apart

I am citizen

Foreigner

Refugee of the city

You don't remember me

The girl you left for dead

Sealed beneath the city
waiting in the dark

You do not know my name

Came to call me Salomé

But nowhere in the gospels goes the girl who danced
by that or any name

I care nothing for language, numbers, codes.
Nor the act of the naming of things

I am the silence that is incomprehensible
and the idea whose remembrance is frequent

I am the one whom you have scattered

And now you gather me together

Feet to walk the ash with

Tongue to speak again

And so the pain of remembering begins

Ancient city occupied

Body a ransacked Temple

I am the one whom you have cast out,
and she who has been buried

I have grown used to the silence,
the slow drip of time through rod!

In the rising heat and melting ice
one by one I have watched the stars go dark

Time passes in ways you cannot imagine

I am she whose hour has come to speak

Too long I have waled

A voice to the East, a voice to the West
a voice from the four winds

Slaves once again we are dying

Forgive me.
I know the sound of water cannot be kind

But the desert
gets between the teeth and in the eyes

On the final night of my life
he came looking for answers

But I had nothing for him

He was just another frightened man
Pontius Pilate

Large crowds in the Temple above me

Celebrating ancient deliverance from slavery
in cur own occupied country

Rage rising in the prayers of the people...

...in the wake of his most resent massacre
on Mount Gerizim

Passover in Jerusalem,
always a flashpoint for trouble

We have troops stationed throughout the city

We are brazing for trouble

I leave at first light

Remanded back to Rome
to stand before the Senate like an errant boy

And justify my so-called 'excessive force'
against the Hebrew insurrectionists on Mount Gerizim

I deny nothing

Had each man cut limb from limb
on that mountain

And I would do so again
to any who dares rise against Rome

I've signed away tens of thousands to the cross here

I will empty this land,
human ash on silent scorched fields...

...to cleanse this new wave of nationalism
that has some to my desert

I have served Rome well.
Governed with iron fist and eagle's claw

Turning fine profit for Empire
from a barren wilderness and her dead salt waters

Yet new I must hurry home and justify myself
to the Senate for defending the Empire

This may well be my political ruination

Exile to Gaul for a man who has devoted
ten years to this hole in the comer of the world

I'll not miss it

The heat, the dust, the primitive tribalism.
The emotionality of the Jew

I am not a man who leaves things unfinished

Tonight you will break your silence

The plan was well laid.
With time the Baptist would have been forgotten

Out on the cliffs of Machareus.
In an abandoned cistern

But something turned the tide
the night of Herod Tetrarch's birthday celebration

By morning
the Baptist's head in your arms

So quiet.
Always at Herod's side

I underestimated you

Shrewd future queen
protecting your privilege from the zealot?

Shrewd future queen?

Or a girl intentionally igniting
the dry tinder rage of your people?

Why?
Why would you betray your own future?

Memory gathers in me

The girl I once was

The High Priests of the Lishkat Ha-Gazit

The corridors of power
to which few women were ever permitted

The blood of my father barely cold on his hands...

...my uncle Herod Tetrarch takes me with him
wheresoever he goes

His new insatiable longing

Kohen Gadol, I understand the new procurator
intends to construct aqueducts

Aqueducts?
Who will pay for such a thing?

Where Rome goes, aqueducts follow

There is the question of the land's Sabbath,
which Rome no longer permits

Every seven years the land must lie fallow

That is out of the question.
How will Rome turn a profit'!

We are not profiteers bent on turning our sacred land
to commodity as relentless commerce

There is also the question of our sawed vestments

With all due respect to your elder...

...the world's most powerful empire
sends its new Prefect to the Lishkat-Ha Gazit this night

And these are your concerns?
Sabbath for the land, tattered holy robes?

Stolen by your godless father
and given to Rome

It was Herod the Great who commissioned
the rebuilding of your precious Temple

My godless father gave you bad!
God's Sanctified House, old man

I have been part of this charade since you were soiling
yourself at your mothers breast, Herod Tetrarch

Your father sold us piecemeal to the Romans
for his seat in the Senate...

...declaring himself King of the Jews.
By whose authority?

- Rome
- We are not Rome

But we are Hebrews alike.
Let us preserve amongst ourselves some dignity

Dignity!
Where is your stolen wife?

Or is this to be Judea's new queen,
your own stepdaughter?

Do not look upon her, for she is dark.
Dark as the tents of Kedar

Is there no end
to your rapacious appetite, Tetrarch?

There is not.
And unlike you, I am not ashamed

Dark as the curtains of Solomon is she

You are Rome's whore.
A servant with a crown, nothing more

And you, Annas, servant no less,
in your borrowed holy robes.

Stepdaughter to a puppet client-Icing
in our own land's occupation

Losses of the native in the vast sweep of Empire.
A brutal backroom politic of survival

I bear witness

A fleet anchors at the port of Caesarea

With garrison of troops,
Rome makes his way to the Holy City

The new Prefect
a dark mountain upon us

Aqueducts are Rome's signature on the land

Our engineers have determined
the cemetery cannot be avoided

The aqueducts will profane our burial grounds

Rome has for too long indulged Semitic sensitivities

Your cisterns are an outdated means
of providing water. The stench is foul

Aqueducts will be built. Roads laid.
Taxes will rise to pay for these new amenities

The people are already taxed to starvation
by your predecessor

Why then should the Temple Treasury
not pay for the provision of fresh water needed?

Fresh water for the ritual bathing you require

The Treasury is sawed, excellence

Entrusted to us from around the Judaic world
to maintain the Holy Temple

Rome can bring us
is gods, is wars, is depravity of appetite

Its academies, its hospitals, its military protection

We can not let you touch the sawed Temple Treasury

And I will not let Hebrew emotionality hinder my
civilising of this backwater to which I have been sent

An outpost, frankly beneath my standing

Civilise? This is the plunder
of our sawed inheritance, the land

The project will proceed.
What remains is merely a question of funding

By taxation or Temple Treasury. the min
for the aqueducts will be provided by the Hebrews

You think Rome is the enduring?

You think we have not seen the likes of you before?

Our sacred city passed from one plunderer
to another over the centuries

Little men of passing empires
tossing us about like dice in your careless games

And we wait

Because sooner or later you too will fade away
as an Empire and be forgotten

And we will still be here.
The Code. The Book. The Law

So go!
Drink your wine, lay with men and women

We play your game, are forced to make absurd sacrifice
to Caesar, pay homage to your Icing and Empire

But our faith endures

You think you are mighty and forever,
and that water will secure your name in history

You will not be remembered
for aqueducts, Pontius Pilate

And you will never own our neshama, our souls

We are waking for Rome to pass.
And we can wait forever

Because you are the Nothing we must endure

Forgive my father-in-law his frankness

Like all the elders,
he remembers the uprisings under your predecessor

No one of his ago can forget the bloodshed

Which is why we replaced him
and gave you the position

Compromise is a quality essential to the High Priest

I am well versed in compromise, excellence.
I was hem under this occupation

Occupation?

- If you are unable to...
- I understand my duties to Rome

We have, already, soldiers stationed
to seize the Treasury in the new week

- Your Excellence...
- There will be outrage, riots in the streets

Then there will be blood in the streets

No uprising will be tolerated
in the prelateship of Pontius Pilate

The natives will learn this

Why tell me this?

Why force me to participate in the theft of the sacred
Temple Treasury to fund your vanity project?

One does need to know from the start that Jerusalem's
High Priest is willing to come to the table

You will learn you are in Judea now. Not Rome

People here are willing to die for what is sawed

And you will learn you are not in Judea now,
but the Roman Empire

And in Rome we call this politics

If this offends your sensibilities...

...we will find a High Priest willing
to embrace the full terms of the position

A worthy price to pay for keeping one's God at all

The native should never forget, each prayer uttered
is an act of supreme grace by Empire

Welcome to Rome's 'hole in the comer', Hegemon

A truly unfathomable people.
Emotional, disdainfully proud. Irrational as women

The Egyptians devoted their vision
to the wonder of the pyramids

The Greeks to their poetry, philosophy and theatre

Rome pursues modernity and conquest

But you will find the Judean native
committed to one thing only

A jealous male desert God

And we Judeans are His harem
of feverishly devoted concubines

One acquires eventually a taste for it, daughter

The wine and ash.
The dance of death and betrayals

Future Queen of Judea.
Come, I must eat. Be with me

I am she who does not speak,
yet great is the multitude of my words

I am she who cries out
and I am cast out upon the face of the earth

In my dreams,
my mother tums her face forever from me

You have ravished my heart

Behold you are beautiful

Far more beautiful than your mother

The coloniser moves in concentric circles

First captures the natural resources.
Then splits the power base

Elects a client King who, in exchange for privilege
and power, is willing to betray his own people

Love is a red rod! valley.
Death is highest price

My father had Mariamme, my own mother, murdered.
He loved her best of all his wives

The body, a city without a gate.
A point of entry breached, an occupation

I would do the same for you

Kill you with my own hands
if love or honour asks ms to do it

I dream every night
that I am lost in Edom's red rod! crevices

Dying

Between your thighs
are secret ravines that will quench my thirst

I ream for you in the dark. Source of life.
Far more beautiful than your mother

Family ruptures like a wound.
Receive her with grief and understanding

I stumble through the red sand.
Find you in the Temple

Your fingers chipping with myrrh,
my head in your small, wet hands

Daughter, in my dreams, you consume me

Take me to yourselves
from places that are ugly and in ruin

Blame the parts of me within you.
Out of shame, take me shamelessly to yourselves

A garden enclosed is my daughter.
A spring shut up, a fountain sealed

Blessed are the meek who provide the surplus

Shackled to the turning wheel,
forever indentured to the Empire

Do I not give you everything you need?

Protect you. Guard your honour.
Clothe. House. Feed you

Open to me.
And let me come into my garden

Temple Treasury plundered

Blood runs in rivers through our streets

City ruptures like a wound on the body

It is best you quell this uprising new
or the number of the dead will rise

No act of sedition will be tolerated
in the prelateship of Pontius Pilate

Please put down your swords.
We cannot reclaim what has been lost

On this Day of Atonement
turn your thoughts to your own transgressions

On these Ten Days of Awe,
the gates are dosing

The Nothing we must endure

A voice to the East. A voice to the West.
A voice against Jerusalem and all her people

I cry out in the Temple, my only place of refuge

Hineyni
Behold I am here

What would you have me do?

I call, but there is no answer

And always, Rome exams her price
for letting us keep our God at all

Forced to stand beside my family,
I am the enemy in the gate of my own people

He me in from the desert, like something wild

Half-starved and naked, preaching the end
of Rome's glory and freedom for our people

People travelled for days just to hear him speak
on the banks of the River Jordan

He led them one by one,
by the hand, through the waters...

...back towards the Promised Land
as our people did a thousand years ago

We have reports of a zealot in Galilee

The number of his followers is growing.
Plans are being made at night in the wilderness

The Sanhedrin cannot control
what is rising in the people

He must be stopped.
He sends each follower home to wait for the end

All over the territories.
Each day growing more explosive with hope

Immediate arrest and crucifixion.
I do not see the complication

There will be a full-scale revolt if Rome martyrs
this insurgent. He is too well loved by the people

This is best dealt with by the Temple,
rather than at civic level

Naturally, the rage of his own people
is something Herod Tetrarch would rather avoid

He offers free worship,
outside of Temple authority

He defies the Roman occupation

Do not burden nor blame the Temple High Priests
with your political crisis

We warned you the people were at a tipping point.
But Rome...

Let the enquiry come first from you, the Sanhedrin,
a less partisan confrontation

- The name of this insurgent'!
- Iokanaan Ha Matbil

John the Baptist will suffice

John the Baptist.
I cannot suffer these native names on my tongue

You will not find him.
We are a far more complex terrain than you can imagine

And we, the finest military in the world.
We will find and bring him to the Hall of Hewn Stone

You will question his programme

Who are you?

Eliyahu?
The prophet returned?

The Messiah,
long awaited King of our people?

Who are you. if none of these?

Your people are from the Priestly Order of Abidjah.
Why do you not take up your temple duties?

By whose authority are you cleansing others?

You do not worship nor make sacrifice
in the Sanctified House

We keep The Book. The Code.
The disappearing thread of our ways

Who will do it if not we?

You change our ancient ways.
Want to form a new faith

You risk us all

The Temple and our ways will be disappeared
if we do not accept Rome

We are all colonised. None here is free

- He contravenes no Hebraic law
- Yet must be stopped

Rome stripped the Sanhedrin of any legal power.
And unless your insurgent defies the Temple authority...

...I'm afraid this Brother of Abidjah
is your problem to solve

Arise! Put on your strength, O Zion.
Put on your beautiful garments

- Crucifixion is a strategic business
- What to do with a man willing to die?

Force him to live. Deny him
the burning light he would make of himself

He has declared he will not eat.
Feed him. Day after day. By violence or submission

Whichsoever end we force it into him,
he will live out his days in obscurity

All the number of his days.
All the days of his life

He will fade and be forgotten

With lime and patience
we will extinguish the flame he longs to ignite

- We cannot risk your vision
- They slaughtered us when we last rose against them

If you have to mew the meat yourself,
and stuff it into him...

...he will learn
every native is property of Empire

And holds sovereignty
over neither his own land nor body

Keep him alive at all costs

On the final night of my life
Pontius Pilate came looking for answers

The plan was well laid

The Baptists name would with time
have been forgotten

The sand erases everything

But when morning light rose on Herod Tetrarch's
abandoned birthday celebration...

Out at the edge of the desert's
lonely fort of Machareus...

...a soft rain, unheard of in that region,
was gently falling

We entered the burnt-out tent at first light

Food left untouched,
sand stained with blood beneath the rugs

Candles still smouldering in the icy desert dawn

Everyone had fled but you,
the future Queen of Judea

Siting alone at the centre of the table
and singing softly as though to a mild

Already swarming with desert flies,
the Baptist's smiling severed head in your arms

Why?
A girl alone could not have thought of such a thing

He wanted only to know about that night.
But he would never hear it from my tongue

I had called for the Baptist's head.
I did what I had done

In the days following his death
we made you pay the highest price

They travelled me bad! to Jerusalem
along roads still being formed through the wild desert

Face covered, mouth gagged.
Someone held my hand

I'll keep you from dying

A prophet is not without honour, but in her own country,
among her own kin, and in her own house

Through the city gates after dark

They were frightened

The death of the Baptist had woken something
in the people that would not sleep again

We made clear you had acted without Rome's consent
to quell the uprising we had been avoiding

We tore the meaning from your gesture

Reduced your act to tawdry scandal.
Let rumour run riot

Rapacious sexual desire for the zealot
who spurned you, and so you took your revenge

An instrument perhaps of your vengeful mother

We let the starving people know
their single flame of hope, the Baptist...

...had been lost to the irrational heat
an entitled young bitch was prone to

Then we let the mob have you

I am the coming together and the falling apart

I am the enduring and the disintegration

The judgment and the acquittal

I am peace and war has come because of me

Citizen, foreigner, refugee of the city

The Lord make thee a curse
and an oath among thy people

When the Lord doth make thy thigh to fall away,
and thy belly to swell

And this water that causeth the curse
shall go into thy bowels

And make thy belly to swell,
and thy thigh to fall away

It was quiet
the first night I spent here beneath the city

Imprisoned in a dark silence
beneath the Saved Temple

All night I could hear them above me.
The Beasts of Sacrifice weeping

And Yeshua, Yeshua the Nazarene
at the city gates, calling

She is come

The Anointed One.
She is come

She is rising

Never permitted beyond the women's outer courtyard

But now I hear what in my free life was forbidden

The men praying in their perimeter

Closer to the centre
the priests make sacrifice in their sacred courtyard

Spray of blood across stones

A fire burns through the night
to cleanse the scent of slaughter

Drums of water thrown
to clear the sacrificed organs

And at the centre of the Temple, directly above me,
the sacred inner chamber

I have been entombed. a seed buried in the dark
directly beneath the Holiest of Holies

Most days we left you with the blue-eyed one.
Abadon, Rome's man of torture

Wake up.
Wake up, daughter of Jerusalem

I can still taste the blood in my mouth
and the salt between my teeth

My hair matted with semen and sweat.
My nails tom out

My fists and forehead
pressed against the ancient walls

You're still alive. Be grateful

Pain whispered to me like an old friend

But you're going to have to talk to me

Until the end of time you will dance with me

Time passes in ways you cannot imagine

Am I old? Younger than before?

I walk the length of God

Until those final hours of my life
when Pontius Pilate came, looking for answers

With time the Baptist would have been forgotten

Out on the cliffs of Machareus.
In an abandoned cistern

But something turned the tide
the night of Herod Tetrarch's birthday celebrations

What happened out there?

There is no language for what I did that night.
No scripture for the nameless one

Just a girl in my bare feet

Beneath the wild, cold moon
at the edge of the world

To the land of no return, the land of darkness,
she directs her thought

The girl I was,
before I did what had to be done

Night fires from Masada
glimmering in the distance

The future receding in the banquet tent

Tetrarch and his power-mongering men

Meat, triumph, and blood-red wine

Slip away into the swelling waters

The sea of death rising

She has a strange look tonight

- She is the image of silver
- I have never seen her so still

- She's like a woman who is dead
- She moves very slowly

She is still but you could swear she was dancing.
A dead woman rising

To be inside her, nothing would survive.
I'd love to get my hands around her warm, little neck

She is daughter to the Tetrarch.
It is dangerous to say such things

To me she's a piece of money.
I'd do it for a shekel

It's going to be a long night out here, Hebrews.
How will I survive it? Nothing moves

You are not from here, or you would know.
If you watch long enough everything moves

Your son?
You are Hebrews. Why do you wear Roman colours?

This territory under Herod Tetrarch
is ruled by Judean Law

To keep this small piece of what is left of the land,
yes, we wear the colours of Rome

- Has the prisoner eaten today?
- He purges after every feed

As long as our people starve
he swears he will not eat

He survived on nothing out there in the wilderness?

Insects and wild honey.
Now only water and prayers

I wrestle him every night until he swallows

He purges. I dean him. We start again

He wills his death. I force him to live

Finally one of us will win

I look forward to the kill.
A man of principle is always finer to strangle

Rome will never risk martyring him

If he dies our people will rise in rage
and the empire will take everything

Herod protects us from this radical

Herod protects his fine wine and harems.
You are the whore of Rome's whore. my friend

Torturing the one man willing to die for your freedom

That man down in the hole,
he's the only one among you who is not for sale

What would you know of the price the Empire demands
or the pain of losing our land?

Rome captured my city when I was a boy

Promised me my life if I burned the house
where my father and brothers slept...

...and severed my mother's head from her neck

Rome exams is highest price
and makes whores of us all

You have no God

I have many. But they are all dead.
For which of them has not abandoned us?

Some day we will be rid of all you foreigners

There will always be another occupation, my friend.
And Rome by any other name will taste just as bitter

Child!

Daughter! Child!

Daughter, why did you leave me?

You know I cannot be without you near

Let me see your countenance

I will gather my myrrh with my spice

I will eat my honeycomb with my honey

I will drink my wine with my milk this night

The joints of your thighs are like jewels

Your navel like a round goblet,
wherein no mingled wine is wanting

Your mouth is like the best wine,
that goes down smoothly...

...gliding through the lips of those that are asleep

Come, drink a little with me,
that we may drain the cup together

I am not thirsty, Tetrarch

I am always thirsty

Nothing but you quenches my thirst.
Your saliva is the secret source of my life

Come eat with me.
I love to see the marks from your little teeth in things

I am not hungry

I am always hungry

Eat, that I can watch you swallow

Yes, daughter. Swallow everything

Come. I will give you
your mother's place at the table

I do not want my mother's place

Why do you hate me?

Have I not given you everything, bride to Rome?
Have I not swam that one day you will be queen?

You belong to me, daughter of the sand

You will dance at midnight,
for me and my battle-weary men

Move us as only a woman can

Take us beyond language

Remind us where God lives

Feed the Holy Man
that he is flushed with meat and wine

And then bring him up and seat him beside me
at my table for everyone to see

They will know across Judea by morning
that their starving prophet languishes now in luxury...

...watching his future queen dance
at the Black Fort of Machareus

Behold, I will send you Eliyahu the prophet, before
the coming of the great and dreadful day of the Lord

Please, you should not be here

The sound is beautiful, is it not Princess?

It is the prayers of a radical
for the freedom of his people

You and your family will not survive his freedom

Please step away. It is deep and easy to fall in

Your father was imprisoned down there too.
Antipas paid me to strangle him

- What are you doing?
- Did you see how her hands fluttered when I spoke of it?

- You will get us all killed
- She's a dead woman. Looking for dead things

Better go inside. This is no place for a woman

A city occupied since before I can remember

Gatekeepers, ho, open thy gate!
Open thy gate that I may enter

If thou open not the gate to let me enter...

...I will break the door, I will wrench the lock,
I will smash the door-posts, I will force the doors

I will bring up the dead to eat the living.
And the dead will outnumber the living

They bid her enter the first gate, opening it wide

And she takes the flown from her head forever

For such are the decrees of the dead

Time to drink, prophet. And be nourished

He is my marge. Do not hurt him.
That duty is mine alone

You will eat, you will drink
and you will live...

...as ordered

You will learn.
We do not belong to ourselves

We cannot leave her here with him

When the Tetrarch discovers your son
standing guard alone above this hole...

...you can offer him your best excuse.
I am leaving

How wasted he is

He is like an image of silver

He is like a moonbeam

He is the water the land has gathered for us.
Waiting for me

Do not look upon her. For she is dark.
Dark as the tents of Kedar

Dark as the curtains of Solomon

In this abandoned water well I am seen,
heard by Rome's most dangerous insurgent

The keepers of the walls
that go about the city, they smote me

They wounded me. They took away my veil

They made me the keeper of their vineyards
but my own vineyard I have never kept

I went in the streets with my feet uncovered.
I cried out but there is no answer

Bid him come forth

That He may hear the voice of she who has cried cut
in the waste places and in the houses of kings

How shall I begin anew?

I hear in the palace the beating of wings

Why are we here?
Whom do we seek in this foul place? Whom?

Hineyni. I am here

What will ye see in Shulamit?

Having removed her flown at the first gate above,
she takes the rings from her ears

To arise, wash and begin anew

At the third gate, she removes her necklace

At the fourth, the ornaments of her breast

At the filth gate she removes the belt from her body

At the sixth, she undresses her hands and feet

At the seventh, her loin-doth

And she rose

For now, the seven gates of the land without return
are open to her

As it were. the company of two armies

I am a wall, and my breasts like towers

Come, O north wind, and come, thou south

Blow upon my garden,
that the spices thereof may flow out

Set me as a seal upon thine heart

As a seal upon thine arm

My vineyard, which is mine, is before me

We crucified the Carpenter
for his grandiose little gesture in the Temple

The uprising on Gerizim, the Carpenter,
the countless insurgents...

...shudder in a larger arc that you started
when you had the Baptist killed

The Senate can exile me
to obscurity in Gaul if they will

But I will not leave here defeated by a girl

Tear out her tongue

Drown her in dirt beneath the city.
Scatter her name to the wind

Before my fleet leaves the Port of Cesarea
for Rome this morning...

...you will be buried in silence forever

And so the hour has come

Temples will fall, cities burn, people scatter.
And I will wait in silence beneath you

One by one watch the stars go dark

Heat rising, ice melting,
a dark oil stain spreading

Ice shelves heave and slip away

Falcon in the widening gyre.
A Second Coming

How strange the Dead Sea looks tonight

Like a dangerous woman.
Quiet but rising

Tetrarch,
the prisoner, as you asked

Brother

You do not have to sell yourself to the merchants

Your fire is not burning on Carmel tonight.
This is not your Ahab

You are not Elijah, brother

You have the fire in you

Why use it against your own people?

Am I my brother's keeper?

She is like a wild woman,
seeking everywhere for lovers

- Tetrarch is full of fear tonight
- Tetrarch is full of wine tonight

This desert in which I dreamed nothing but water

And only two paths home.
The aqueducts to glory or the ocean back to Rome

Light the torches. It is dark out here

It is absurd to kill oneself, is it not'!
Life. Life for the Baptist, at all costs

- Herod why are you afraid?
- I am afraid of no man

And he was afraid.
He said how full of awe is this place

This is none other than the house of God

I am Rome's whore. I too dance

Tetrarch, please.
Sit down. You are drunk

Come, daughter, dance

You cost me my brother.
Come and dance for me and my men

There have been times at night, as I have stood outside
the gates and looked into the vast empty plains...

...that I have felt fear.
Yes, I too have been afraid

Tonight we will watch our daughter dance.
And weep for ourselves

She does not belong to you

For the land belongs to God

We are but guests in her fields

She is mine, prophet. I do with her as I will

I hear something in the air.
The beating of wings

The earth moves in anger beneath our feet

And only those who live by her know her secrets

There was a ladder set up on the earth,
and the top of it reached to heaven

And behold, the angels were coming and going

Herod, you are afraid

If he is the prophet Elijah, I cannot spill his blood

I'd do it for a shekel. I'd do it for a song

Do not assume that you can buy a man

For already he belongs to God

A man wrestled with me until the breaking of the day

And behold, there was an angel touching him,
and she said 'Arise, eat'

The land shall observe a Sabbath for the Lord

She cannot keep giving endlessly

Rome does not pause for God

We are not Rome!

Of what are you all afraid?

The land whereon thou liest,
to thee will I give it and to thy seed

Holy man, stay with us. Live. Eat

I will not eat...

...while my people starve

You will eat. You will live.
You will fade and be forgotten

And they sat down in ranks,
by hundreds, and by fifties

God will be with me
and keep me in this way that I go

I cannot let you go but that you bless me

Oh daughter, in your naked feet,
in the wine and ash and blood...

...bring us before God.
Dance for me

The ancient flame sways and trembles

Murmuring like a fire that struggles in the wind.
As if it were a tongue that speaks

You care-member us.
The parts of ourselves we have forgot

Ask of me anything and you shall have it.
I swear it on my eyes

On this plate, in my hands

The head of Iokanaan Ha Matbil

Who is this that cometh from the wilderness,
like pillars of smoke to martyr me?

Thou an beautiful

Terrible as an army with banners

Why do I hear the healing of wings?

No, daughter!
I set out upon an open sea of promise

But here before us a dark mountain.
This will be our end

Time to fly. Time to fly

The night has been long

The day will break soon and woe to Jerusalem,
from the light kept so long

Three times 'Mums her round with all the waters

And at the fourth, lifts up her stern
so that our prow plunges deep

Bring me the head of Iokanaan Ha Matbil

How can I be asked to kill you, brother?

Do as she commands, brother

Light the fire of the revolution

And they took up twelve baskets
full of fragments, and of fishes

They did all eat, and were filled

No one will ever speak your real name again

The Carpenter and the Baptist,
men of minor consequence...

...we make the heroes of tomorrow

For we who hold the pen, scribe the history,
form the idea, the days and nights of time...

...arc it into the future

And thy seed shall be as the dust of the earth

- And thou shalt spread abroad to the North
- And to the South

- And to the East
- And to the West

And in thee and in thy seed
shall all the families of the earth be blessed

We are the flame carried forward.
We went up the hill and took the fort

Burnt all the bends
and released the people from their debt

Temple Mount is ours again

We chased the Romans to the shores,
captured their golden eagle

The people finally reunited.
set foot north with a hundred thousand men

Free. Untamed. None but our own

No one remembers the girl

But at the edge of the desert, unheard of in that region,
a soft rain was gently falling

Rome returned. Always will.
Men wrapped in a flag. We come

In defiance of a girl
who danced bare foot beneath the wild, cold moon

Their soldiers breached the city walls.
Butchered everything that breathed

Bodies on the Saved Mount

They set fire to our Temple

Jerusalem buried in the blackened ash and silence

Only the song of the flies could be heard

It is quiet now in my exile,
but you haunt my nights

I wake at dawn
to see you in the shadows

I think of you fading alone there in the dark
in your final hours

Did you weep?

Did you cry out, tongue torn from your mouth?

Or did you smile?

I call out at dawn. Who are you?

The True Insurrection

Mother of the Revolution

Nameless One

You don't remember me

You will never know my name

I have no tongue to cool you

No eyes to burn new truths

No fingers to count the numbers, stars, days

No thighs to move the earth

I have ash in my hair. I have nails in my palms.
And blood on the soles of my feet

No number, no code, no plan, no road

No secret tunnel back to you

I am Chaos. Grace of fire.
The song that wakes the dead

Alpha and Omega, The first and the last,
the end and the beginning

I am disappeared but among you

In the cleft of the rock.
In the secret places of the stairs

The One without name

I am