ARROWS AND MOUNTAINS.

They say that if you climb up

the god will climb down

and tell you how to run your town.

Don’t you worry Hammurabi—

Shamash will show you how to be

Just come on up this windy road,

gotta get a law code

from yours truly, god of the sun

if you want Babylon to run.

In this notion its assumed

the law comes down from heaven.

The arrow points down from god to human

so you know not to murder or eat leaven.

So we get a text and do our best

to obey, and avoid the awful mess

of ever asking in the first place

whether any text ever really

pointed down to humanity from divinity.

The Holy Mountain’s fine and good—

if you can find a god, you should

But when you come down consider this fact:

Gods don’t write texts, we do that.

And so, many gods many mountains

many scenes of divine meetings

All from humans naming wonder and source

because the arrow points up—

that’s the actual course.

And so, the rocky Sinai peak looms

under fire and smoke and thunder booms

Come on up and see in Shemot 19. It says:

“Yahweh came down onto Mount Sinai,

to the top of the mountain,

and called Moses to come up,

and so he went up.”

Moshe climbed to the tip top just to have it

etched in stone on 12 tablets.

And when Moshe came down

his face was shining with divine light

just to thrill us—

they had to cover his face

because it just might kill us…

that might kill us—

or the idea that gods write texts,

arrows point down,

and you have a two-thousand year-old manual

to run a modern town.