Sun Rising

Opening the door to our bedroom one recent morning, the Hawaiian day flooded in, complete with waving palms, coral sea, and cloudless blue sky. It’s always a shock when the horses of the night, the hazy aftermath of dreams, transitions into the uncluttered perfection of Hawaiian weather.

I had been recently writing many chapters for my novel, Pianist Lost, that were influenced by Sax Rohmer’s Brood of the Witch Queen, suffused with the incense of necromancy and Egyptology, a craze when I was young. I used to send letters about hieroglyphics to E. Wallis Budge, the translator of the Book of the Dead and author of the great Egyptian Hieroglyphics Dictionary, which I pored over. (He actually wrote me back; maybe he realized I was 8….)

So the dawn this particular morning seemed like the Egyptian barge (Atet) had traversed the bad dreams of the night to emerge transfigured as the chariot of the sun god. Amenthes was one of the names of the Duat, the Egyptian hell. It had similar topography to the land above it, with trees, lakes, streams. There were also walls of iron and trees of turquoise.

The monsters of the night were many: Apep, the flame-eyed serpent, the primordial chaos. There were seven gates of Osiris and 21 secret portals in the field of rushes, guarded by gods or demons.

The first had nine-headed jackal gods which fed on rotten flesh, the second had a spitfire snake called Sesy. The third gate contained the Lake of Life, where Amen Ra drew his breath. A flaming snake lived in the eighth gate, the lighter of flames but extinguisher of heat. The 12th gate featured the goddess Nephthys in the form of a snake. From here in the form of a scarab, Khepri, the morning sun, rises.

As the rock which sealed the crypt was rolled back by Jesus, so we open the door to the new day.

This in its own twisted way is an homage to John Donne’s “The Sonne Rising,” and a resurrection poem.