Speakest thou in parables...

by DANIEL ABDAL-HAYY MOORE

There was a little landlocked country called Yorack that the Emperor Snork of Whiteland desired to pin onto his military jacket like a medal. Yorack was run by a despot who kept everyone down by threats and hangings, with circles of colluders and deluders around him to enforce his drooling proclamations. He sometimes smiled and raised a rifle into the air, shooting it off occasionally to show his fatherly benevolence.

Emperor Snork of Whiteland used heavy Vaseline on his hair, and always wore pressed blue suits with a bright red tie, and was in every way the perfect upholder of Lethusian justice. But at the thought of Yorack, his knees buckled and his hands beaded sweat in trembling greed. It festered in his heart (that smelled of pizza and pork rinds) and he watched for an opportunity to send his very own personal army in, behind the backs of the snoozing citizens of Whiteland, to overthrow Yorack's leader and make Yorack his private property.

Now unfortunately for Yorack, some Yorack-like thugs (though from far away Udi Abibiyya, who speak roughly the same language and have olive complexions and flashing black eyes) drove bomb-filled cars through a city of Whiteland one morning, and buildings toppled like so many matchsticks. People caught fire; never had such a tragedy befallen Whiteland, which always exported its murderous impulses to faraway places whenever it needed to fill its own coffers and grease its oily wheels with their natural resources.

Under Snork, acting as Vice-Emperor, was a Frankenstein-like concocted being named Charnel, with the furry head of a snarling bulldog, a mechanical heart and a body made up of various dead underlings who voluntarily contributed their lives, limbs and torsos; who was rumored to be the power behind the throne; and whose eagerness to control Yorack exceeded even that of Emperor Snork. He was elusive and rarely showed his grim muzzle in public, and then only in short, quick doses, to remind everyone, now reduced to a state of abject fear, that any positive thoughts they may have about the world around them were false and must be exchanged for either snarls like his own or outright, round-the-clock howling and barking. Charnel snarled at Snork to invade Yorack for the sins of Udi Abibiyya. No matter if they had nothing to do with the tragedy, no time for such subtle thinking, plus there was a wing of the palace filled with similar bulldog-hybrid beings (all put together near Alamogordo, New Mexico), all exemplary Lethusians (whose god, as their paid-off scholars said, died to wipe any consciousness of good and evil from their hearts and any need to behave humanely) who also wanted to pin Yorack on their jackets, regardless of the blood that might be shed in the process.

They brought in master forgers and propagandists - specialists in linguistic magic - and started their campaign targeting Yorack as the Center of Sin, the Devil's Workshop of all Evil (since they themselves were so conversant with it), and the Purveyors of a Poison to kill the world. Then they hired very squeaky looking representatives with shiny hair and scrubbed cheeks to present their findings to Whiteland's public, and before anyone could say, "Wait a minute!" Emperor Snork sent his private army in and dropped 20-ton flaming pianos and Neighborhood Disintegrator Mirrors from the sky to wipe out any resistance to his invasion.

Horrors abounded. Doors were kicked in and innocents killed. What they didn't factor in, however, was that the land they were pillaging was also an ancient domain of saints, alive or deceased in body only, who passed through various realms with ease, dispensing balm to the suffering and retribution for the unjustly slain. And one, a very tiny person in a remote village, sat in his crumbling adobe room by candlelight, and wrote:

ENOUGH
The dark is defeated
by a sliver of light

(to be continued)

DANIEL ABDAL-HAYY MOORE is an award-winning poet. For more information see www.danielmoorepoetry.com