Sacrilege

Rahaf Al-Mawed
4 min readJun 11, 2024

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Angel of Death - Émile Jean-Horace Vernet (1851)

Your winter gaze battled my once clement hands, and it seems your usurper has conquered because my body has functioned differently to snow ever since. You reframed my rood into a dagger. Your truth found me an echoless chamber filled with dread and marcescence.

I can exonerate Judas for he needed to fulfill his barren districts, but your silver bread was the root of all blasphemy. Perhaps, that machine was right: Reincarnation is your dream, and you kept reaching. You were a man inside an empire inside a man inside a sin. That sin shed from when you were carried by melting hands until it devoured your heart and brain. When these parts of you are swallowed, what other possessions do you hold?

You preached for a system, but you were the very existing embodiment of that mechanism. As you paved your touch towards the chapel garden, the moths confronted sepultures inside Gardenias’ petals. Your grip frightened the saints away.

It was written in the scriptures about the man with the spherical trajectory in possession of a third spirit. Had I yielded my hand to propose ink or ivory, I would have been called a fraud and not a prophet. A mistress and not a master, a daughter and not a God. My nature has built me silent vows until I resisted the cold.

I was made to grasp a most curtained instillation. And perceptive as I am, my veins forbid its entrance. A dissolved lock of the door to Zion, flooded by a God’s repentant temptation. The very whisper of a passed down sin concludes his indiscretion. Women’s condemnation of Eve’s culpability and the gaze of man, but who wrote these scriptures and placed her an alluring trespasser? The hands of alleged divinity.

I am keen not to transgress the land of apostolic words. Man is not woman in the volumes of psalters, but man is all. God is beheld equal to man in colloquy and virility, and the human is man. Language conveys treason instead of record.

I am mistaken for a recent blossom when it comes to this kind of truth, but I have been irresolute since the beginning of my time. When the lads and lasses were chanting prayers in the nearest chamber, I was ceasing contact with the movement of a cyborg till I formed a connection with the upper department in my frame. I seized hold on libraries and carried out a trial against falsity. When the age of my youths were questioning, I was already up there ages ago, lurking and enlightening, reading and writing about this.

And I cannot intake poison and abandon the serpent, so I became what each cult despised. I transformed this sin into sacrament, and my veil into protection against Sol. But one flaw is fatal to the entirety of the system, and my eyes bend at its allusion. So, I question the ecclesiastic of why the idealism is a masquerade, why the reasoning is sophistry.

If this theism is a blind precision and faith is attestation, then how did different sets of revelations avow themselves upon masses of distinct communions? How many Gabriels can the sky cradle? Since when were all mortals Gideon?

I am averse to discrepancy, yet I am expected to adhere to the wilting vellum. I have recognized my incessant cuneiform carvings to be extirpative and Herculean, whilst the parson studies one of concoction and fabrication in the name of deity.

It seems that humankind is bound to succumb to a violent tree of life. Isn’t that the mirroring image of the creator who chose one man and sailed him away from the flood to recommence a second Seth, a first Jesus, and infinite Eves?

Your winter gaze buried the luminary from my sight, but I crawled when you threw stones at my feet until my arms reached a glistening fountain of memoirs. Your catapult as vulnerable as your essence, as piercing as my spines. No usurper is an enduring cæsar, lose no sight.

Purgatory shalt not be where my might dwells, for no sin binds my shoulders. Pandæmonium could have been my metropolis if I gnashed my teeth, but I am afraid I am neither an evanescent nor a fiend, not a saint nor a martyr. I am the lake of fury, the frozen leaves, the spirit that creeps back to the tree.

What is conceived as sacrilege ends with being the blithest light my pneuma has spectated.

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Rahaf Al-Mawed
Rahaf Al-Mawed

Written by Rahaf Al-Mawed

A writer with a perennial and perseverant quill.

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