Flame, Glass and Ink are Poems, essays, and reading notes by Stefania Joori Suh

Tag: ancient Egyptians

  • New Possum’s Book of the Curious Cat

     

    There’s once a cat name Romp Pomp Bunter, aka the Curious Cat,
    who liked to romp with pomp and bunt his head against
    his guardian, the woman with the beautiful but lonely heart.
    She named him in rapt contemplation of the thought, of the thought
    of his name; his ineffable, effable name, debonair and extraordinary.

    The Romp Pomp Bunter has a secret that no one knows it:
    The Romp Pomp Bunter once saw a grand statue of Bastet
    In a book on the history of cats originating in ancient Egypt
    And was so impressed with the splendid grace of the goddess
    That he wanted to emulate the mysteriously beguiling poise
    Even if he was a Californian moggie tomcat of Los Angeles.

    But the Romp Pomp Bunter, ever the Curious and Adventurous,
    An orphan kitten whose parents nobody knew or cared even,
    Felt that he was originally from the Ancient World with a reason
    That he looked nothing like the ordinary domestic short-haired,
    The insignificant, the common, the trite, the obsequiously tamed
    Breed of Cats that contrasted the Egyptian Mau, the First of Firsts
    Endeared to Pharaohs, Queens, Priests, Soldiers, Farmers, and Artists.

    So, the Romp Pomp Bunter believed that he was the Royal Descendant,
    The indolently elegant, adoringly capricious, the inscrutably alluring
    Egyptian Mau, the paragon of the goddess Bastet, divinely beguiling.
    You see, that is why his name is the Romp Pomp Bunter, the Curious Cat.

     

  • Feather of Two Truths

     

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    Osiris and the Sacred Scale, courtesy of National Geographic

    The days on earth ended

    And the days in Afterlife began

    As the Final Judgment of Osiris,

    The Lord of the Underworld

    To weigh the sins of the man

    On the Scale of Two Truths

    Against the Sacred Feather

    In the Hall of Goddess of Truth

    Waited for him to say “Never!”

     

    The assisting gods recited

    The long line of sins on earth

    To which the man answered,

    “No, I had committed none,

    None of the sins from birth to death.”

    Then Osiris ordered the goddess

    To put the man’s heart on the scale

    And the Sacred Feather in her arms

    To be on the other side of the scale.

     

    The heart as light as the Sacred Feather

    Kept the Perfect Balance of the Scale,

    And the Supreme Judge decided to declare

    The man to be true of voice by the Scale

    And allowed him to enter in eternal bliss

    Celestial Garden among the Stars

    That never died but lived forever

    Sailing as his happy heart wished

    And filled with Eternal Euphoria.

     

    P.S.: This poem was based upon my reading of the ‘Book of the Dead,’ an ancient Egyptian guide to the Underworld instructing the dead what to expect, where to go, and how to behave when entering the Underworld. The ancient Egyptians regarded death as new life, the beginning of the Afterlife where the souls of the virtuous dead lived in a heavenly landscape that looked so much like Egypt on earth. The blissful afterlife was meritorious by the ruling of Osiris, the supreme ruler of the Underworld, who questioned the souls of the dead according to a long list of sins that mankind was prone to commit by nature and put their negation of sins on a test by putting each of their hearts on the divine scale to weigh against Maat’s Feather.” Maat was the goddess of truth, and as she put the heart on the other side of the scale, the balance would remain the same if the heart was free of sins. Only such a sinless, weightless heart would give the soul of the man a passport to Paradise. Fascinating.