Patrick Kosiewicz >


Assassins

Burning everything in their path
at the invasion
you could only hear the song of a burning bird in the forest.
Then you could hear
the wind
breaking the necks of all the birds.

At the sight of an ocean of swords
she hurled herself from the minaret
and her head smashed against the rocks.

Jinn
Men
and Angels
witnessed entire villages becoming fuel of carcasses in hell.

Graves were filled with fire.

Thousands were crucified along the roads to other lands.
Hundreds were skinned alive.
Our skin
was stuffed with straw and nailed to the battlements.
Our heads and hands
were sent to Cairo
to be hung from the ceilings for the general's banquet.

We ran to the mountains.
During the famine
we slept on pillows of flies.

In these crags
towns villages and castles
come into being and then disappear.

An eagle led us to a summit.
A cold stream was behind it and a fertile valley within.
We planted trees.
We built a library in the rock.

Scholars came from Baghdad, Genoa, Toledo, Samarqand, and beyond.
Mountains intertwine
and vultures shrink from the passes.

Stone cisterns hold rainwater from the slopes.

We found inner meanings of holy books
by reading them in the present tense.

A people within the rocks
our valleys pulse with all species of fruit and grain.
Gardens spring from stone.

Our sons are apprentices to doctors and calligraphers and the mysteries.
Our women sleep naked on beds of saffron in jasmine chambers.

We are diplomats and protectors of refugees
who practice the new inward within the inward.

Our ambassadors deploy to other castles
to exchange gifts and offer truce.

Our ambassadors deploy to the camps of our enemies
and leave warlords
lying face-down in their blood-filled silk pillows
wearing shirts of knives.

Lords of nations fall to poems of daggers.

The hand is hidden yet we see the pen writing.

The blade flashes yet the hand is hidden.

No emperor
king
caliph
sultan
minister
judge
knight
warlord
or holy-man
is safe.

Paradise is man.
Hell is man.

We record divine ciphers in scripture and nature.

From the foothills of Hindu-Kush
to the Mediterranean
people quote our treatises and equations.

The mathematics are recorded in your bones.
12 apostles
12 proofs
12 imams
12 dorsal vertebrae.

7 prophets
7 cervical vertebrae.

Study the numbers
music
motion
botany
anatomy
how stars govern human life
and how planets influence
wisdom
and eternity.

Learn the wisdom of the world
then the divine laws
and see reality like the angels.

Then you are beyond doctrines and laws.
Then you replace the sciences of the ancients.
Then you are an assassin.