Tom Byrne - Crom Cruach Revisited скачать в хорошем качестве

Tom Byrne - Crom Cruach Revisited

A moving beat poem about the ancient Celtic practice of killing your own children to bring a good harvest. ====== LYRICS / POEM ======== Cromm Cruach The Plain of Adoration; Cromm Cruach, The 'crooked god'. That ancient Celtic king Called Tigernmas once fashioned for each back A dreadful burden. Subjects had to bring One third of all their offspring to this thing Which stood, surrounded by its twelve stone kin. With angry lamentation, they would wring Their children's necks and in the dreadful din Would pour their offspring's blood around its golden skin. They did it in the hope their sacrifice Would somehow purchase some security From famine, drought and plague. They thought the price, This dreadful levy of their progeny, Would buy their god's attention to their plea. But when disasters still sometimes occurred, The priests would blame the people's laxity In awful worship, and exhorting, spurred Them on relentlessly beyond the marked one third. Lamenting, wailing, grieving. Tears and blood Would fall to fertilise those sterile stones, To make them fruit their fortune crop. A good Autumnal yield was bought by little bones. The god's adherents thought: "The lord who owns The elements is due his proper share." And hence the plaintive sacrificial groans Were harvested before the fields. The fare Was placed before the silent idol's heedless stare. They tore their hair. They tore their cheeks in grief. They beat their sides. Their throats were hoarse from cries. The harvest came and went, but no relief: The cycle would once more initialise At New Year's planting. Then their drooping eyes Would stream with tears as one third once again Of their remaining issue faced demise. But still they brought them to the plain and then They saw their little children face that last amen. For centuries this cycle rumbled on, And ground the hearts and hopes of supplicants. A self-sustaining death automaton; A treadmill trod by victims in their trance. They could not stop. Cromm Cruach's sustenance Became the rock foundation of their lives. And dedicated to his maintenance, Each two-thirds generation that survives Inherits all its predecessor's deadly drives. At last St Patrick came upon this scene. They told him all that happened on the plain: The parent driven children death machine. St Patrick and his hammer faced the main Stone idol, cased in gold, the blood of slain Young victims dried on it, a second skin. St Patrick hefted hammer; this insane Blood custom stopped when old Cromm Cruach's chin Received the forceful gist of Christian discipline. But Patrick did not kill the crooked deity. He merely smashed its form. We've often seen The many faces shorn of any gaiety Recurring on the television screen. The sad, bewildered parents who have been Bereaved by something in importance passing Their child's young life. What Patrick found obscene Is still, I think, quite common. Victims massing Across the world. And them Cromm Cruach still harassing. No golden image now, but maybe flag, Or economic system, or belief. I see that crooked gold skinned scalawag Still lurks in each abstraction or motif Held more important than a parent's grief.