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Gebla By
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I am called Gebla and I speak for the people of the temples.
How this has come to be, I do not know. How it is for me to be a voice for so many, I do not know. I am only Gebla.
Today your people see cold stones, but you cannot hear
us. You touch these majestic ruins which are all that is left of our lives, but
you cannot imagine who we were or what our spirits were like. You cannot fathom
what held meaning for us; what we dreamed; what we feared. Thousands of years of
that-which-has-come-after colors your judgment and your interpretations. Be
tolerant of us. We are not savages, nor are we fools.
My people. So many people.
For generation on generation into the lost past we loved these stones. These temple stones -- now beaten, eaten and faded by time -- were our lives and our souls. Here we worked; here we prayed; here we cried and here we sang. We sang to our bones, my people of the temples, until they resonated as one with the bones of the earth. The stones of the temples once sang with our voices. They are silent now, standing alone in the sun and the wind. You will never hear what we heard.
You will never see the temples as they were seen by my people, towering massive and eternal. Holy places. Holy stones washed with a hundred colors of shadow from blue to gold, and lit inside with living fire. Red ochre, the temple’s blood pulsing from walls and ceilings and curves and curves and curves. The unspeakable dignity of symmetry and scale. The unutterable elegance of space revealed and the mystery of things which were hidden. What you see is gray ghost stones now, bleached of their glory and pecked by scavengers.
The hands that carved these stones were fleshed just as yours are. The crafters of the temples lived with pain of aching backs and bruised muscle and dust in the eye. We took food at the end of the day and slept in night’s darkness with our families. We woke to birdsong and day’s light, and then we rose to start again. We watched the sky and the sea. We knew the winds and what they would bring to us. We trusted in the powers and the cycles of the great creator who made all things to be so beautifully abundant for us.
I speak for the people of the temples so that you will remember that once we were.
We told stories to our children and we carried our babies. We honored our old ones. We cared for the living and for the dead. Our precious animals were taken with reverence and ritual. Our fields were nurtured. My people sought shelter from the summer sun and shivered in the cold damp of winter. We lived our lives here in this island place which was our only home. When we died our bodies remained here for all time. We took comfort that things were right and as they were meant to be. We knew peace.
Ah, and we learned. Such marvelous ideas came to us! A man could see a thing and try it in another way. A woman could produce such joy and wonder, and the whole community would come to look at what she had made. We taught each other to share these good things and make use of them. And always, always, we came together in worship to our temples. We made our thanks and our offerings at our temples. You cannot imagine how precious were our temples.
The finest herbs and flowers once lay upon these stones. The finest grain. The sweetest water and the richest of all that we had. Vessels decorated with holy symbols and designs, fired hard in the earth and filled with bounty. Shells and bones and other things of nature, of beauty and of meaning. Our hands rested here. Our feet trod these floors and passages. We took breath in these spaces. We strove to understand. We strove to commune with the divine. We strove to have our hearts and our spirits be known.
So strive we still.
I am Gebla. I am stone. I speak for the people of the temples.
© Gebla A. Stone, 2002