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