No God but the Gold Forged in the Furnace of Flesh
- Richard Mather
- Nov 25
- 2 min read
No God but the Gold Forged in the Furnace of Flesh
Jakub Lejbowicz slithered east
Beneath a heretic’s curse.
A worm of rot, crowned in Ottoman dust,
He wore another man’s face —
Berukhiah reborn
Jacob Frank, Westerner of Podolia,
Messianic pretender.
In Salonica, blasphemy transmuted:
Sin kissed the breasts
Of someone else’s wife.
Torah pressed into palpable skin,
White fire turned utterly black.
Apostates writhed.
A thousand hearts ruptured,
Bleeding mad laughter,
Bleeding disgust.
A prophet dancing on the edge of law
As if it was a blade;
Guttering candles in secret rooms.
“I look not upward, but to the dirt
Where God writhes now.”
If sex was a sacrament,
Power was a gilded chariot dragging
Heaven to earth —
No God, said Jacob Frank, but the gold forged
In the furnace of flesh.
Under the gaze of Czestochowa’s
Black Madonna
He dreamed the Virgin’s secret
And declared his own daughter
Eve the redemptive maiden
Of the apocalypse.
To the Polish nobles
His voice rose like trumpets.
In Offenbach am Main
He died a mortal man.
No angel but a dog snarled
At Jacob’s abyss.
The Holy Roman Empire staggered
Like a drunk;
The Jews of Europe reeled
And rocked as another messiah
Came and went.
From her Gottes Haus,
Daughter Eve, Mother of God,
Holy mistress,
Bore the Frankist creed in her belly —
Finding in death’s black
A brightness beyond light.
Eve fell to earth on Polish soil —
A debt of gulden pressing gravely
On her mortal body
Like basest lead.
And all the young men
Who hoped to sire the coming God,
Gathered dust in empty rooms.
And the Shekinah
Departed this crucible of ash —
Unfruitful.
