Part II
Cause can be
half a world apart
from its
unforeseen effect.
All that has
been large before
can be
normaled by enormity
if there be
Juggernaut
up to the
task.
Nova-noon! New
island
born unto a
distant sea
erupts
volcanically
wails steam
and, spewing lava,
screams loud
enough
to deafen
oyster beneath obstetric sea,
clears its
ruptured throat
of stinking
sulphur breath,
crimson bile
and magma phlegm.
Firebelches
drive all space insane
smashing
everything within it,
driving ocean
rudderless upon itself
stampeding all
the winds of earth
into just one
wind, looting gravity,
with nothing
firm enough to brake it.
Darkest
daylight’s dawn
sees beanstalk
timbered low
without a
logger’s warning.
The tempest of
this island’s birth
rips pages
from the record book,
strews them
upward into chaos
swift as
lightning going home,
loud as all
its thunders.
Though in the late 20th century in the UK it also came to mean a large, heavy truck or articulated lorry, in general English usage, a juggernaut is an unstoppable force. This usage originated in the mid-19th century as an allegorical reference to the large carts in Jagannath Temple in Puri, Odisha (Orissa), which are used on annual festival days for carrying wooden statues of Krishna, his siter Subhadra, and brother Balabhadra and which reputedly crushed devotees under their wheels. In this case, Krishna is honored as Jagannatha ("world-lord"), sometimes believed to be the cause of all material creation; the “Brihat Samhita” and the “Vishnu Samhita” claimed that wooden gods grant their worshippers all four human aspirations (longevity, wealth, strength, and victory. The first European description of the festival was the 14th-century “Travels of Sir John Mandeville,“ which referred to sacrificial Hindus being crushed to death after throwing themselves under the wheels of the chariots. In the preface, Jehan de Mandeville called himself a knight from St. Albans, England, but no evidence of such a person exists; the author was probably either a Liège physician, Johains a le Barbe (also known as Jehan a la Barbe and Jehan de Bourgogne) or a Flemish Benedictine monk Jan de Langhe who wrote in Latin as Johannes Longus and in French as Jean le Long, Most of the work is either derived from earlier travel accounts or are fantastical; for instance, any fatalities that occurred at the festival were probably accidental, caused by the press of the crowd. But the book was widely translated and distributed, and was used as a reference by Christopher Columbus, for example. By 1844, the alleged sacrificial nature of the temple carts was embedded deeply enough in the public mind that Charles Dickens (in “The Life and Adventures of Martin Chuzzlewit”) could comfortably allude to lovelorn Augustus Moddle as being crushed by “the Car of Juggernaut,” and three years later Charlotte Brontë have a character in “Jane Eyre” refer to the heroine as "worse than many a little heathen who says its prayers to Brahma and kneels before Juggernaut."
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