Waking The Lion

Written by Monika Cooper

(variation on Victor Hugo’s Booz endormi)

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It is the hour when lions wake to drink,
(Softly now, softly, O strings of my lyre)
With padded footsteps to the water’s brink.
Oh why must I go to the threshing floor?
A gleaner, yes, but not a wallflower,
I raised my sheaf like a long-stemmed bouquet.
The stalks like sunbeams lit the dark doorway.

I was too full of joy for singing then.
And now the hour is much oh much too grave,
The threshing floor a vault of sleeping men,
Men slumped like sheaves in an enchanted cave.
The girl who tip-toes here has to be brave
To leave the safety of her guardian wall
And move among the dreamers of this hall.

She looks down on his body in the dark.
He is too old for her, as old as Time.
And she’s young as the wave that bears the spark
Of morning when low ripples rise to chime.
She lowers herself to lie next to him
And crave the warm protection of his cloak.
He sleeps, a king among his harvest-folk.

To take a king, to make the signed appeal
To him and Heaven in dark of dawn,
As if you’d breached the threshing floor to steal,
Past defunct laws, into the danger zone,
All prior guards deploring you for gone:
What orphan nation would dare such a thing –
And wake a sleeping lion, rouse a king?