Do You Feel Lucky?

(and feel free to comment! My older posts are certainly no less relevant to the burning concerns of the day.)

Friday, April 10, 2009

The Descendants of Cain

Cain should have died,
but God said: "No.
I put a mark on that guy.
And anyone who kills him
gets the business."
And Cain, driven out
from the land, was fruitful
and multiplied. And his seed
bore fruit, and branch, and
set down root - which grows
among us still. God put a mark
on man, when he let Cain go.
And one day we shall be avenged

But not sevenfold, no
We've devised worse maths
than that, for this. And we speak
all one language, we have brick
and bitumen - our tower stretched
its top to heaven, and found it!
Empty. No one home. And nothing we
propose to do will now be impossible,
and this is only the beginning
of it all.

God should have killed Cain outright.
Or at least, left off the mark - that
protection! God spared him, to mark us!
God inflicted that mark on us all. If
even God let Cain live, but with no
mark - spared him, but spared him to
a life of no distinction, marked out
for nothing - maybe Cain would have
just fled to the wilderness then,
ashamed, and died out. And
maybe we could somehow
now be free.

But no. We must walk the earth proud
and win our wives as killers,
with heads held high: see
my mark! The mark of Cain,

Put there by God.

Pretty cool, huh?

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