The Gnostic Jars

Lyrics

Bitumen on the lip of the jar.
Linen wrapped tight against the dark.
This is how you save a thing against the coming winter.
This is how you put a word to sleep.

They have their four, and they have their fire.
Every other gospel is a liar, they say.
And the smoke is rising from the library floor.
So you take the truth that cannot be spoken
And you give it to the earth, a secret token.
You make the ground a promise you can't keep anymore.

Sleep now, Gospel of Truth.
Rest now, Philip, in this clay oubliette.
We are burying the light, not putting it out.
The earth keeps a cold pantry, you must not forget.
We will wait for the hunger, we will wait for the doubt.

Fifteen hundred years of pressure.
The weight of empires measures
The silence in this womb of baked red clay.
I remember a scribe's thumb smoothing my spine.
A reader's breath, a whispered, dangerous line.
Before they sealed me from the light of day.
I was a living water, then a heresy.
Now, just a memory held in trust by the dirt.

December, 1945.
The seal breaks and the dead air comes alive.
A boy's hand, not a soldier's boot.
Reaching in to find the root.
The air rushes in, a new testament.
A language starved for fifteen centuries.

Wake now, Gospel of Truth.
Rise now, Philip, from this clay oubliette.
We have unearthed the light, not put it out.
The earth keeps a cold pantry, you must not forget.
We have returned with the hunger, returned with the doubt.

And some leaves to start the fire for the morning's bread.
Some words the desert kept, the oven took instead.
Not every buried thing survives the hearth.
Not every gospel makes it back to earth.