The girl-child, become woman, leaves her childhood for the palace life.
From beyond the Island Of The Elephant – realm of Khnum, Satet, Anqet – you flow from your
secret cavern-source to those bouldered, bord’ring shores!
Small pilot boats ‘n ridden rafts threw cheers toward the hull, their voices smashing gladly ‘gainst the iron.
A gull alit, a-lightly, on a length of timber as the timbre of its undulating call caused crashing waves of echoed sound to bridge the Avon. It preened at its grey-tinged feathers before pacing the abutment’s edge.
The shimmershine of sweat shed through their painted, perfumed canvas caught the glist’ning glare of Horus ‘fore it soaked the linen veil that cloaked the contour-lines that led below their naveled peaks ‘n met between their thighs.
Two grids, lain down ‘pon each surface, their calculated squares collecting up, in tessellated time, their timeless, abstract forms.
Her tilted head held em’rald eyes; her countenance – false-furrowed. Her mouth mixed signals: hold, unstable frown!
Watching, all the while, th’Egyptian sky, she breaks upward, stands, and steps over and between baskets of fish ‘n grain…
“Avast!” the axe-fall blade, abrupt, demanded death-industrial: it called, it falled, found its fortune to be laid upon the wharfway stone.
The past: t’was present, as the present: t’was pushed passed. The world: t’was floating ‘midst the passing future.
The girl knelt and stared at the grains, all gathered, of the hot, compacted sand, lowering her right hand slowly t’ward its canvas-surface.
Sunrise, then, o’er the city of the sceptre; dawn about the fort upon the chasm.
william altoft 