The top five commandments
Always a
scourge in the wrong hands, the tablet was used as an accessory in torture for the legitimization of cruel games. Imagine being trapped in a tiny cell 24/7 listening over the loudspeaker to Kim Jong Un proclaiming self-deification again and again, all the while numb with hands tied, blindfolded, shivering. Just a stench of death and throbbing eardrums with sleep deprivation. Dictators always have skin in the game in eliminating the opposition, stymieing bubble-bursting of their omnipotence, intimidating the rank and file through the gleeful but macabre dispatch of wannabe rivals to hell. Jang Song-thaek probably had it coming. Right hand thug and power behind the throne in North Korea, with vicious purges of less than 100% obsequious government servants featuring in his chequered history, this man was certainly no angel. Ask his only daughter, who he forced to suicide after she eloped to Paris. ‘Obey your parents’ was one of the top five revered commands together with ‘Hero worship’, ‘Prostrate yourselves before all images of the dear leader, though spit on the images of his enemies’, ‘Always accompany the leader’s name with praise’, ‘Slave away 24/7’. As for Jang Song-thaek? He was denounced as a counter-revolutionary on live TV while being arrested at a gathering of the top brass. Handcuffed, chained, at his court martial accused of being ‘far worse than a dog’, ‘despicable human scum’, next he was airbrushed out of pictures depicting him with the ‘dear’ or ‘beloved’ leader. Jang Song-thaek’s end was grisly: caged, naked, devoured by a pack of attack dogs
Ra complaining of Joshua
The Greeks
and Romans knew: If
I was knocked off course
it was never pretty. Forests
became fireballs while meadows by meandering rivers reddened to dust. So, it simply wasn’t clever to disturb my solar barge on its way across a blue sky. At night I had issues with an underworld serpent lurking in the recesses, always vainly trying to hypnotize me and pack me off
to another planet, but I kept
going day after day until one day I met Apollo, who offered me the chance to trade up my barge
for a berth in his sparkling new chariot that would gallop at the same pace through the sky. Life in Egypt was no longer quite what it had been and so on reflection I was pleased to accept. Since Moses had somehow contrived to out-magic our magicians, faith in our true gods had ebbed. I felt eyes staring up at me less reverentially. What really offended me, though, was being jeered at by Joshua (who had succeeded Moses) and all his blood- thirsty crew terrorizing Palestine at the time and making an absurd demand: that I apply the brakes, screeching to a halt and staying put for 24 hours, all to facilitate a total massacre of the Amorites (Joshua 10). The idiots knew nothing of cosmology at all
Looters
The order
was unequivocable: No looting! Ah, but the gleaming silver, the silky Babylonian robe, the shimmering gold to fondle, to hold! Achan couldn’t help himself, and plundered while the rest of the army put Jericho to the sword, murdering every living being found and destroying all signifiers of a famous city’s cultural icons. After Achan confessed under questioning to his sin, he wasn’t ready for what came next. The first stone, small and round, smacked his skin. The sharp second drew blood. Black, blue and punctured, he withstood the pain for as long as anyone could, with his family watching, weeping, wailing in the wings, waiting to be next.
And so the wicked and their wives went off with a whimper. While massacring women and babies was de rigeur among the Brownshirts in Joshua’s special forces, ill-discipline was a definite no go. Orders like the ban
on looting had to be followed religiously
on pain of death. For more contemporary
despots, looting garnished genocide,
like the Gestapo, hand in glove
extracting gold fillings
at Auschwitz to kiss
an evil ring
Rejecting the wisdom of Solomon
Solomon knew, when he offered to cut the baby two women were scrapping
over in half, that a true mother would refuse. At the court of Solomon (aka United Nations), the non-Zionists
pleaded that their baby
not be ripped violently apart into red slices.
A pacifist like Mahatma Gandhi, Reform Judaism’s Chancellor of Jerusalem’s Hebrew University advocated harmony, so that both Jewish and Islamic cultural traditions could be celebrated reverentially side by side. With equal rights for
all citizens, he envisaged togetherness in sowing and reaping, in planting
with love and harvesting in a golden glow. War threatened, though, with butchers’ knives being sharpened and he warned of “the spilling
of blood, ruination, vicious
imminent sword of Damocles
destruction for everyone
created in the image
of God”. Tragically,
emotional arguments
swayed the court’s
decision, with
insufficient
heed paid to
Solomon’s
wisdom.
These poems take inspiration from passages in the Old Testament. The font these poems use is Courier New, though any monospaced font, such as Aptos Mono or Cascadia Mono, works equally well. Mark Wyatt discusses his technique in ‘Using letters as number-like particles in constructing pattern poetry’, an article that appeared in the Journal of Mathematics and the Arts: https://doi.org/10.1080/17513472.2025.2518519
Mark Wyatt now lives in the UK after teaching in South and South-East Asia and the Middle East: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8647-8280. His pattern poetry has appeared since 2024 in Antifa Lit Journal, Artemis Journal, Ballast, Borderless, Clockwise Cat, Cosmic Daffodil, Dust Poetry, Exterminating Angel, Full Bleed, Full House Literary, Greyhound Journal, Hyperbolic Review, Ink Sweat and Tears, Libre, MacQueen’s Quinterly, Moss Puppy Magazine, Neologism Poetry Journal, Osmosis, The Paper, The Plentitudes, Radon Journal, Re-Mediate, Shift, Sontag Mag, Streetcake Magazine, Talking About Strawberries All Of The Time, Tap Into Poetry, Tupelo Quarterly, and Typo. Other pattern poems are forthcoming from Allium, Brooklyn to Gangnam, Genrepunk Magazine, and Santa Fe Literary Review. Two of his poems have recently been nominated for a Pushcart Prize.