Northwestern Lake Trail: Lamassu Painting by Charlotte Yeung

Northwestern Lake Trail: Lamassu Painting

“You hadn't fully toppled a king till you had also annihilated his images…

In Nineveh….IS gouge[d] out the eyes of the Lamassu….”

-Kanishk Tharoor and Maryam Maruf

It must be nice, to be wanted.

A protector rather than a heretic. 

I wouldn’t want to be gouged for 

it, impaled by the un-holistic 

rage of men too far gone to 

see that their actions help none,

only hurt, choking the world 

with their hate. 

I don’t know anyone who would 

know enough of me to hate me. I

am so young and careful that I have

hardly made a blip in the world, let 

alone grown enough to become a 

protector. 

She is so powerful that her image of a 

thousand years of Nineveh

echoes on a rock in Chicago,

lovingly brought to life on an azure

shore of painted stones by the hands

of an artist who has probably never 

even seen Lamassu in a museum, let

alone in the sun and sand. 

She must have been strong, women 

must be. Lamassu is a parent star,

a constellation of life packed within 

a powerful, winged body. She used 

to grace the clay tablets beneath 

entrances, mother guardians to 

homes. Then she was transformed in 

full likeness to flank square 

behemoths of palance entrances, 

sentinels to the kings of many families. 

I wonder if she had a choice, if 

she wanted her likeness to be 

so lovingly carved into stone.

Perhaps she simply wanted to protect

her family, the way I used to care

for mine before all who remained were

old and wise enough to no longer need

intervention from a friend. Who doesn’t

want to be loved? I used to play that 

game, feet dancing foolishly close to the 

riptide blurring parent and friend. 

I thought to be ruined was to be loved. 

And perhaps there is a grain of truth in the 

sand of lies I’ve poured down my throat 

to quench my thirst–perhaps to be loved

means to be shattered, to have wise 

eyes gouged out by the indecent hands

of impulse. After all, Lamassu and 

I are both at the mercy of the sonic

rebound of cultured war. Love, hate, right, 

wrong–all ideas that morph to the waves

of time. I do not wish to be her, 

though I wonder if the salvation of 

protection is enough to drown out the 

crashing obliteration of revisionist terror.

I have time in comparison to storied stone–

perhaps I will bloom when I no longer

drink sand, my pagan questions moving 

faster than the grains of half-truths and lies

that scrape my throat.