ASTARTE’S PRIEST

Mario Azzopardi

Astarte’s priest I had become.

A convict of a nymph intoxicating me with song and lusting after me until sapped.

And in pre-numerical epochs I knew the Mother with sumptuous Breasts.

And I grew up grasping a pointed rod

diving through the azure Mediterranean piercing octopus and mackerel

identifying the mood of skies from storm petrels and cuckoos.

Transmuted into a winged bird

migrating from vale to vale fluttering inside caves in my full nudity.

I could even recognize the serpent’s sweat and read his eyes

as the water dries up: I trusted the ancient dead’s power to make water flow again

on my uncanny island in the middle sea.

I would spit soil between my fingers onto unyielding rock

with every initialled image a sentient being calling me,

ferrying me back and forth in time:

from a catacombed pelican to a pseudo-Roman and a Governor

a muslim-christian hermit mestizo

a crusader against corsairs

a Grandmaster’s page

a rabble-rouser against the French. And then

a shoe-shine boy to the British.

Then came my turn as a Random Fortune Judge

amid missiles raining with no respite

in a merciless cataclysm on earth and the bloodied sea.

They fed me leftovers from soldiers’ barracks.

Not so long ago I became obsessed:

I’m a free euro-mediterranean.

In my delusion I believed in an age of miracles

And knew the password.

Then came the abrupt realization:

since the era of my Mother’s bountiful breasts and Astarte’s holy cunt

I still don’t know myself:

too many fissures have unravelled the compilation.

And once more in my nakedness

I streak birds with red-hued ochre

swooping down to the deep water perhaps to decipher my ancestry

or

I impulsively swirl around fateful circles marking the caved ceiling.

And once more I carve a fish or a sow feeding my people

sustaining spirits in a shady demented dance

of vicious flames.

And I discovered

this sea of no horizon.

This rock of sterile valleys now solely yielding burnt oil.

And I

swaddled in strange garb with thinning hair rustled by the north-west wind

with layer upon layer of costumes to match the centuries

am crowing on the roof:

a castrated rooster with bound legs

strung upside down

ready for a beheading on Astarte’s altar.

Translated by Patricia Gatt