The Poppy Mother, a text made of opium (textus opii)

This text is dedicated, with my whole heart, to mothers of newborns who were shot in the delivery rooms of the hospital in Kabul, some during childbirth... Some of the babies were next to their mothers when that happened and survived this attack. I dedicate this text to all the babies who have to move on on their own and moms whose love is eternal. And... to Europe that persistently rejects Afghan refugees and denies the war in Afganistan. In the month of May, when poppies bloom. This attack is known as Afgan maternity ward attack.
15/5/2020

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I, the red flower with a dark core on a long slender stalk.  

Are you looking at me?

I love sunny positions and I love the richness of darkness, I love rich and permeable soils. I love rich and permeable minds, sunny minds in the houses of light.

Do you understand?

I am persistent. I am a persistent weed in arable fields, by roadsides, along rails, amidst grains, I grow on all abandoned lands. Unlike many, I love my own abandonment; I am when you let me be. I am! I am bright red, flaming red, yellow and white, and as soon as I bloom and stand upright, I joyfully discard my petals. I don't need luxury. I cultivate more occult knowledge than decorating a pistil . I surrender my life to the fields by the third day.

I am completely invisible. Completely. I swing my plant being with the wind next to the track, I love railway tracks, these are my lines of transition from plant to man. You are a man on the train of frenzied time, riding the points of ravaged time, insensitive to dreams and insensitive to plants. You are a man of plant oblivion. Three centuries ago, you named me Nocturnal Oblivion. You used to enter the gods at night, the lighthouses of abandoned lands. Dreaming was the main occupation, and all the nights in the dark core of my flower were illuminated by your eyes. Your eyes illuminated the paths of eternal time though which we traveled together from Sumer with the Babylonians, with Phoenicians to Egypt following the Assyrians, from India to Persia uttering loudly in exultant cries of Anatolia, with flowers in our hair, danced in Minoan culture, planted in Crete and surprised by Greek Eleusinian mysteriously across the Arab empires to Europe, inhaled in drunken Rome, blown away with a single puff of smoke all the way to China and Indochina, via silk and seed back and forth, through silk, now and everywhere, ancient and present, dormant awoken.

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A figure of a Minoan goddess, found at Knossos in Crete,
from 1400-1100. BC

Because of the three capsules of the poppy fruit, the species Papaverum somniferum, which are placed on her head like a crown, in historical interpretations she is better known as the goddess of the poppy. Closed eyes, raised arms and open body indicate a state of openness to insight or embodied seeing and being in the otherworldly. The Minoan culture from Crete moved to Greece and by cooperating with the plant culture embodied in poppy gave birth to as yet unpenetrated Eleusinian mysteries.

The cult of Demeter is directly related to the knowledge of the worlds of Papaverum Somniferum, or as they called it:
The Mother of the Gods.

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I was your plant of joy, hul gil you called me when you were Sumerians. For millennia, I am the one who cries for your otherworld, the weed and the goddess, red, the one made of clay who loves to live along the long-distance tracks. You extracted my sorrow, Lachryma papaveris. So thank you, human-like creatures, ignorant travelers, slaves of time and slaves of goods. While you were trading, there in Baghdad, I, sitting like an old man in a smoky tea room, secretly snuck into your pockets between sips of red tea.

Can you smell me?

I was a weak old man, a commoner, with eyes crumpled between wrinkles, bright, watery eyes that could see far away. We drank tea lightly, together, taking turns, sitting on the ground talking about nothing; aratpa pal, poppy juice, would you like some? You agreed diplomatically, with a trader’s instinct because the exchange is good for business. I, an old man, took out a shisha, put in the embers and inhaled three times. The first time for myself, for I am the flower of flowers and the Mother of the Gods; the second time for your soul, for you are a man, a strange plant; and the third time for the cure of God himself, forsaken, scattered, God invisible.
 
I am completely invisible, completely.

We traveled to your times, demarcated by clock hands.
The Iron Age of the old rage, the Bronze Time of the soft crime. There, 5,000 years before some Christ, we huddled together on a chilly Neolithic night by the fire in the hearth of a woman’s womb. I was a child of the gods conceived by a heart, you were the heart. Seen by your eyes, I was conceived by you. The womb was our house of light, the earthen roof over our heads, beneath which plants and people know and infuse into each other’s existence. You are, man, my fruit in a poppy capsule with numerous compartments filled with kidney-shaped seeds. Man, you are my fruit-child! I am the Mother of the Gods!

Can you hear me? Don't be a stumblebum! Remember!

The night is always immense enough to be starry, spacious enough for nocturnal oblivion. It is sprinkled with poppies along the road, and all your historical memories in timelessness are like opium: meconium. History laden with violence, harnessed like horses, running after itself, grace streaming from the eyes of horses left between maces and swords, gunpowder and spears, the smell of blood and the taste of alienated life. Hundreds of thousands of faces and hundreds of thousands of faces and hundreds of thousands of faces soaked in morphine gauze in collective pain of a bright red color that does not abate. A child of God and a child of God and a child of God were born in Kabul in 2020 after some Christ, at the time of some Allah in the middle  of collective madness of God’s oblivion, they shot mother and mother and mother in the maternity ward as soon as the child and child and child came out of the womb. A warm, red, safe womb. Guts full of love and life fluids, floating and close, calm, soporific, maternal, human, earthy, beloved, red, fertile. Can you hear me my child, my dear, mother's gold, I am here in timelessness, I love you in timelessness; love is not demarcated by a clock  hand, it is not alienated by place, it is not abolished by violence, love is immeasurable, growing like a vast starry sky from which I see you, I always see you, and I always look at you and always listen to you, my heart, can you hear me ... and in the cradle of a baby left alone crying the bitter tears of a newly created life that is recognizing itself through liquid. I am the red flower, your mother, your extracted sorrow, abducted, unconscious and anesthetized. I am the fruit, the baby rattle, the musical cocoon of the innocence of a child's being, a newborn being, and a plant-human being being born again and again, with each late spring.

I am the Mother of the Gods and I am patiently waiting for your springs to arrive!

Out of love for you I live like a poppy, everywhere, bright red. I am a plant because I cannot tolerate human pain, so I alleviate it with bottles of morphine and sedatives. I give myself for your calm, I give peace to the history of tissue. I stream peace into the core of the collective madness of God’s oblivion and sow the seeds in the fertile amnesia of humanity. Behind the curtain of amnesia we are allowed to meet, the mother of humanity and the child of humanity, love and beloved. How one loves is unchanged since ancient times.

And in this culture love is love in this culture is love in this and in this and in that culture love is love. And in this culture pain is pain in this culture is the pain in this and in this and in this culture pain is pain. Management skills of Lachrymae papaveris, poppy tears full of fields all over Afghanistan. I, the red flower with a dark core on a long slender stalk thrive in a torn country, I the Afghan curse am the Afghan treasure that covers 85% of the world’s opium production. My milk, my tears, opium extract (extractum opii), herbal wine (vinum opii), opium pollen (pulvis opii), opium syrup (sirupus opii) ... A litre of my tears in Afghanistan will give you 800 US gold coins, will arrive on the railway tracks from which I will wave to you, so that on the streets of Europe the tear becomes a jewel turned into a heroine, the heroine of Western modernity of 16,000 American gold coins. The heroine will caress you as long as she wants, and when the time comes, her Greek capricious divine nature will suck you up. Because of the heroine, human gods fell one by one head over heels in love, with no added religious opiates, equipped only with the modern pain of absence in the world garden of addiction. Just so it doesn't hurt. Just so it doesn't hurt! Just so it doesn't hurt!!!

I, Papaver Somniferum, praiseworthy, laudanum, the cure of God himself, God for God.

Me, Papaver Somniferum, Paracelsus himself, lesser known as Philippus Aureolus Theophrastus Bombastus von Hohenheim, brought from his journey through Asia as a treasure of immortality, along with lemon juice and the essence of gold. I, Papaver Somniferum, am consumed frequently by all historical and contemporary addicts like lemonade, chasing its essence of gold, its house of light, its wealth of darkness. I am an analgesic of history! The Crusaders loved me so much that the Chinese associated Christianity with opium. I pulled the dervish by the arm as he spun in love rapture of unattainable perfection. I rocked the ships of French sailors returning from colonized Indochina. I gave Greece a cradle full of plant weeping that built Europe. I died with the gods in Egyptian tombs. I blew up Babylon. I took over Tasmania, rushed to China. The British were so in love with me that they fought the Opium Wars with the Chinese. Because of me there are still wars, drug bosses and Europe are looking forward to every new shipment of tears of my Afghan herbal wine that flows very welcomed through the European streets intravenously side by side with unwelcomed Afghan defectors because there is no war there, because mother is mother is mother is mother is already - dead .

Are you looking at me?

Do you understand?

Can you smell me?

I am completely invisible. Completely.

My human pain is alleviated by my plant expand. I am, in the end, just a flower that loves sunny positions, rich and permeable soils. I discard my petals joyfully, I am a hul gil, a plant of joy, I love abandoned lands, and empty stone houses. I don't need luxury. I cultivate more occult knowledge than decorating a pistil. My pollen is blue.

Are you sleepy?

My pollen blue is abundantly visited by bees. During the day they enter the gods, the light houses of abandoned lands. Together we buzz the Eleusinian mysteries, the paths illuminated in the dark core of my flower, quietly, in bumblebee bass.

Remember!


The Poppy Mother is part of series of Herbal Writings
(see: Biljno Pisanje), the first one translated in English.