Oracles for the Third Millennium
Two thousand years go back in time
And then eight hundred more,
Three hundred ere great Plato wrote
In Timaeus of God soon boron as man.
Isaiah, poet and prophet both,
In Jerusalem’s fine city gave hope of a Messiah
When speaking to the court and its King Ezechias.
And like to him we see Malraux
Holding up de Gaulle to lead
France in the nation’s glorious day
And be a light to all the world.
The Alliance Old, from Genesis to Numbers,
Saw times of glory, and other times most dark,
With books of history, books of prophesy,
Books of wisdom, books of proverbs.
Prophets sang of hope or sang their sad laments
When hordes streamed from Assyria and Babylon as well,
Led by Teglat Phalasar or Sennacherib,
To plunder the Levant, the plains that there grew green.
Isaiah told to Babylon and Damascus city too,
“Mere piles of ruin you shall be, left to the grazing goats,
Your strongholds then abandoned and in the forest lost,
Your land become a desert, no harvest more to yield.
The sobbing and the weeping of your peoples will be heard,
Their tumult will be heard like the thundering of the sea,
Like dust to be scattered, by disaster overwhelmed,
A people soon forgotten, no future they will know.” (Isaiah XVII)
Our early third millennium has seen this all come true;
A mere three years ago with cruel bloody blows
As forecast old Isaiah, the curse has struck anew.
Syria’s ancient land we see divided once again,
As terrorist assassins, the so-called Jihadists,
Cutthroat fundamentalists from all around the world,
Mercenaries of crime with hearts composed of stone,
Falsely claiming Allah to justify their deeds,
Dregs of poor humanity scraped up from all the globe,
Fanaticized extremists taught that Heaven awaits their soul
With ever-virgin maidens awaiting their embrace
When they die deluded wretches for others to make gain.
Deluded by these fables, every horror they commit
On people in a land not their own concern.
They grasp at sheer delusions, promises absurd,
A rag-tag bag of criminals, with no common cause,
All they know is slaughter and crimes of every kind.
Given arms by the West, paid by dollars come from oil,
They are urged to cause chaos on a scale beyond belief.
They are a hopeless rabble paid by plotters in the South.
Fridays see their mobs pour into the street,
Shout the holy name of Allah to bring terror and destroy.
Can they be so suicidal, so mad and so obsessed,
Bringing havoc and destruction and shouts of fury too?
Terror they have brought to all the Syrian land
With weapons and incitement come from countries round about.
With the frontiers broken down, the agents of world powers
Sow death and destruction, and rape is their reward.
Kill Alawite or Christian, that is their job to do,
Backed up by a fatwa that has never been annulled.
O Europe and the West, of your ancient Christian faith
For future generations have you got nothing left?
Heirs of the Age of Reason, is your only culture death?
You think alone of worldly gain, your pleasures and your dollars,
You forget the values, all that made your fathers great.
Your soul is what you’ve lost, and evil what you’ve won.
Because of all your plotting, all Syria is aflame.
No respect for sound tradition, for custom, or for Faith.
The exiled and uprooted, on the frontiers they abound,
Huddled in their makeshift tents with misery all around,
Hunger and disease, winter cold and wild despair.
The UN sends some aid in little dribs and drabs,
But it’s painful for the people who once had decent homes.
Destruction now is total and the people forced to flight
To Lebanon and Turkey. to Jordan where there’s peace.
Many try for Europe and risk drowning in the sea.
In Lebanon good Christians do the best they can,
But with Palestine and Syria, the burden is too great.
Islamists around the world join hands for the Jihad,
But the West is hypocritical and plays with double face.
Isaiah’s warning to Damascus is now seen realized.
But can words ever state the horror of the case?
We see daily on our screens from Syria gruesome scenes
Of corpses mutilated and corpses rent apart,
Hundreds dead from weapons and hundreds from disease.
Hunger has its quota and thirst adds to despair.
The birds and beasts themselves have nowhere they can hide.
An extreme religious state is a dream that goes too far.
Sheer waste of time these missions, these meetings and decisions;
While conf’rences mark time, destruction runs apace.
Bishops, men of God, and Sisters in religion
Are taken, hid away, and for high ransom held.
And remains of the past? Syria full of riches,
Cradle once of Christendom, cradle of culture too,
Of hermits and of saints and of spiritual streams,
On the west of the desert and the Crescent Fertile called,
Reaching o’er Mount Lebanon, Cappadocea, and the sea,
Arabia to the South and then up in the North
The Orontes river and cities of old fame,
Ephesus and Antioch, towns ere touched by heaven,
Rich were its harvests, wheat and milk and honey,
Renowned are its legends, its history and its myths.
Gods walked in its gardens with apples shining gold,
Fair Eden was once here with its temples built for prayer,
With the song of the Muse, scent of flowers in the air.
Now what is its fate, what has it become?
Touched by evil magic and the torturer’s device,
As if by the wave of a sorcerer’s magic wand,
Syria’s now ablaze and ‘tis by demons ruled.
The lurid pen of Dante could not describe this hell,
Not even Holy Scripture could paint this coming doom.
The broad land of Syria is trapped with no way out.
A web was skillfully woven by cunning plotting hands,
But when the scheme was launched, none foresaw the end.
Like our good Pope Francis, pleading from Old Rome,
We find hope in God alone and, fervent, pray to Him.
If the force of my words shocks my friends of every faith,
This is what I say to them: God must loath this foul excess,
The God we adore, the God we all do love.
God cannot bear the crime by the legions come from Hell.
The martyr if he’s true accepts what God will send
And martyrs for Christ there have always been;
No martyrs can they be who kill for a reward.
Would God give reward to destroyers of His work?
Fools seek bogus Heaven for a falsified Jihad,
But can God desire killings and suffering and horror?
Does He now thirst for blood, who once was God of love?
Can we bear such savagery as the new millennium dawns?
Such sufferings and outrage, such spilling of red blood?
Heaven is no place confined in space and in time,
But enjoyment of felicity whose mysteries are vast,
A symphony enduring, light in eternity,
With no bourns nor matter, things we cannot understand,
Without any who are damned, for God is loving-kind,
Protecting His children and all that He has made.
And Mary, Queen of Heaven, in light abounding all arrayed,
Is waiting for us there, and is responding to our prayers.
French by Joseph Matar – Translation: K.J. Mortimer
