On this fallen |hguahp!| fined again, swallow them
sonnet no. lxii
This is the seventh sonnet in a crown. Read from the beginning, starting here.
For the eighth sonnet, please click the link below:
In Primitive Mythology, Joseph Campbell writes of an ancient tribal rite that involved the sacrifice of a young man and woman while copulating on a wooden platform above a large pit. At a climax of their frenzy, to the beating of drums, the platform is broken and the children plummet into the pit, buried in turn by the wooden platform. Grisly. Happy Halloween, y’all.
I don’t recommend Campbell to anyone as an historian, the details (without citation) in which he describe rites that passed over 4,000 years ago make me skeptical; but like Frazer, Campbell’s storytelling is a goldmine for writers.
The rites were part of Campbell’s cherry-picking way of theorizing over what he called the cannibal gardener: sacrifices made to the earth for the harvest (in his retelling of this rite, for instance, the children are pulled out of the pit dead and then cooked and eaten by the community; I won’t follow that line, excepting the idea that they were fertilizer for a garden, thus consumed through whatever crop was grown). I’ve attempted in these sonnets to politicize those rites, making my fat tourist and my concierge the victims of a sacrifice that has more to do with appropriation and identity than soil fertility (but it can be both).
If you return to the beginning you will find that this poem has been building up to the 7th sonnet, to pave the way for the 8th, the volta. Afterwards, the final 6 sonnets will turn, aborn, aboon, abairn.