Note: the hard copy version of the poem below was inadvertantly published in an incomplete version. The poem here is as the complete poem, as the author intended.

The Lady of Ur

I feel like I´m the oldest museum in the world

and I´ve just been ransacked.

My books have been burned.

My ancient face smashed against the floor.

I am the woman in the photograph

with a gun pointing at her head.

I am lying on the ground,

arms bound behind my back.

They want something nobody has.

My oil wells, my oil wells

are not what charmed Alexander the Great

who praised my peaches

when the orchards between my rivers

were already old.

I am the garden

The first woman.

The first man.

The Mother of Writing.

I am the first law.

The first town.

I am the place everyone was on their way to.

I am where everything was from.

I invented bread.

Created wheat

The arch, the vault, the dome.

I am wool, wine, honey.

The lost wax.

The oldest song.

I am all the religions

I have been raped in all the wars.

Children have been torn from my breast.

I am the Earth.

For hours now since I wokd up

I have been staring at the red colored tiles.

I remember now where I am.

I am thirst

They are coming I can hear the stamping of their boots.

-- Ambar Past

Ambar Past was born in the U.S.\and has lived several decades in Chiapas, Mexico and published several books of poetry in Spanish. For three decades she has recorded and translated Mayan women¹s ritual poetry and magic spells. A bilingual Tzotzil-English anthology of this work, Incantations by Mayan Women, in now in press. She is also the founder of the Mayan printing and bookmaking workshop, Taller Leñateros, and Woodlanders¹ Workshop, and directs the journal, La jícara.