Saturday, May 18, 2019

Steven Fortune writes


HATSHEPSUT

Cataclysm of recalcitrance
and aquiline charisma
the God daughter
wore the archetypal flesh
flower of deific Amun's
affidavit seed
never ceasing to reformulate
the framework of whatever
raiment glued the smoke of
fertile Punt frankincense
to her aromatic body
Her perfumed aura
shielded the fumes of new
trails branded into nature's
overgrown gardens
Fumes that would be replicated
were she granted access to our
odiously caricatured bearded lady
An odor in the kingdom
that hosted the nativity of queendom
for the womb that carried
the enlightenment of Sirius
A balance of empyreal ascension
and the Moon's hammer of adhesion
like the obelisk that poked her path
to heaven into the inflated firmament
A balance unyielding enough
to have the sacred literati hearing nothing
of the unheard-of flammation of
the common loins ignited by
the feel of golden breasts
And when she took her soul and smells
to the gardens of Amun
it's as if a people were awakened
from an equilibrium hypnosis
Born-again conservatives impaled
her existence on misshaping chisels
of an order compromised
But the walling of her obelisk
was history's retort
Her lineage-intoxicated stepson's
censorship defected to
the aim of preservation
long enough for terminology
to christen her a queen
Long enough to suture
the chronology of an epochal
matriarch of a tomorrow that ran
from the moon when seduced
and runs from the flares of a Sun
made resentful by conversion to
alternative worship

1 comment:

  1. Djehutymes II (Thutmose, "Thoth is born") was the son of Thutmose I and a minor wife, Mutnofret (probably the daughter of the Eighteenth Dynasty’s founder Ahmose I), and was probably a minor when he became pharaoh. Scholars dispute whether he reigned for 3 years or 13, and the de facto ruler was probably his wife, his older ½ sister Hatshepsut ("Foremost of Noble Ladies"). They had a daughter Neferure but Hatshepsut was unable to bear any other children; about 2 years before his death Thutmose II fathered a male heir, Thutmose III by a lesser wife. (He may have married Neferure at some point.) Hatshepsut became regent for Thutmose III the following year, in 1478 BCE. She was the only child of Thutmose I and his “Great Wife” Ahmose and when she married her brother she was elevated to the position of “God’s Wife of Amun,” the highest honor a woman could attain other than queen. In the 7th year of her regency she had herself crowned the dynasty’s 5th pharaoh, only the 2nd female pharaoh in Egypt’s history, some 1600 years after the 1st one. Soon after coming to power her steward a commoner named Senenmut, who may have been both her love and Nefurere’s tutor, designed the Djeser-Djeseru (“Holy of Holies”), her mortuary temple beneath the cliffs at Deir el Bahari, on the west bank of the Nile river. In it, the composite creator/sun god Amun-Re was prominently featured and depicted as her true father. The night of her conception was inscribed on the walls, relating how the god came to mate with her mother: [Amun] in the incarnation of the Majesty of her husband, the King of Upper and Lower Egypt found her sleeping in the beauty of her palace. She awoke at the divine fragrance and turned towards his Majesty. He went to her immediately, he was aroused by her, and he imposed his desire upon her. He allowed her to see him in his form of a god and she rejoiced at the sight of his beauty after he had come before her. His love passed into her body. The palace was flooded with divine fragrance. Opposite to the temple’s Birth Colonnade was the Punt Colonnade, relating her expedition to “God’s Land,” most likely in the coastal region of modern Djibouti, Somalia, northeast Ethiopia, Eritrea, and the Red Sea littoral of Sudan, although it may have also extended to southern Arabia; the Egyptians regarded Punt as their ancestral homeland. According to her inscriptions, Amun “the Lord of the Thrones of the Two Lands” told her, “Come, come in peace my daughter, the graceful, who art in my heart, King Maatkare [ie. Hatshepsut].... I will give thee Punt, the whole of it...I will lead your soldiers by land and by water, on mysterious shores, which join the harbors of incense.... They will take incense as much as they like. They will load their ships to the satisfaction of their hearts with trees of green [i.e., fresh] incense, and all the good things of the land.” Her reign was one of the most prosperous and peaceful in Egypt’s history, although she may have also commissioned military expeditions early in her reign. She was among the most prolific builders in ancient Egypt, commissioning hundreds of construction projects; her buildings were grander and more numerous than those of any of her Middle Kingdom predecessors, and later pharaohs often attempted to claim some of them as their own. So much statuary was produced that almost every major museum with Ancient Egyptian artifacts includes Hatshepsut objects. She died in her 22nd regnal year. She was not buried in her mortuary temple but in a tomb nearby, and late in Thutmose II’s reign her cartouches and images were chiseled off stone walls and her statues were torn down, smashed or disfigured, and buried. Her name remained unknown until rediscovered by archaeologists in the mid-19th century, due to the researches of Jean-François Champollion and others. Her mummy was found in the Cairo museum’s holdings in 2006 by matching a loose tooth; its extraction led to an abscess that resulted in her death.

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