The HyperTexts

Elijah Perseus Blumov

Elijah Perseus Blumov is a poet, critic, host of the Versecraft podcast and substack, and Translations Editor at Literary Matters. His work has been published or is forthcoming in venues such as Birmingham Poetry Review, Image, Rust and Moth, Tar River Poetry, and others. He is the author of The Necklace of Harmonia (Lettre Sauvage 2026) and Against Oblivion (Measure Press 2026). You can read more of his writing at elijahperseusblumov.com.



Archangel

for L.

Now, from the practice death of dreamless sleep,
my eyes adjust to grasp this hint of heaven:
held in this golden light of past eleven,
you stand here beaming, greeting me, and sweep
your hands across your dress, as if to keep
my eyes upon the fact that you have striven
once more to be my beautiful, have given
yourself in love again. My heart would leap
no less to see a messenger of God
proclaiming some good news—you are together
the angel and the news. I would be awed
no less to see a spirit, flaming feather
wings, than this: an atom-danced façade
that loves me, that I love, in morning’s ether. 

(originally published in Think Journal)



Antarctica

The tundra glows beneath a flaming sky,
as lovely and as merciless as life.
Its grandeur, which to be must be beheld,
will deepen as it threatens the beholder,
subverts the very premise of its power,
and intimates a joy transcending death—
some cold, impossibly objective beauty.

Great love is hidden awful in its heart:
here, penguins flock in droves, compelled to risk
dear life each spring to raise their half-doomed young.
A hundred daily miles to fish, return
amidst the roving seals and razor winds,
to feed the chicks whom, grown, they’ll never see,
yet, for a season, are their only world.

And shall you not demand, you human souls,
your love be just as fierce, without reward
in working through your frigid world of days? 
From Chaos, Nature howls its will to order
in minds that in their aims are more sublime
than any cold sublime they rail against. 

(originally published in New Verse Review)



The Catechism of Hades

Engraved upon a promontory in the Aegean

I.
Because all those who love and live for long
will see their loves extinguished, let us view
already dead our loved ones while they live.
Yes, let us laugh, converse, and hold to them
amazed, as if they were but ghosts revived
for just this instant, and thereby defend 
against the grief they cause us in the end.

II.
The highest hope: to tire of one’s life,
for only then is one prepared to leave it.
And yet to tire of this spectacle
of senseless splendor, endless, ruthless grace, 
is tragic in itself, the young will say, 
and all the wise agree. Confronted by 
the inescapable, seek no escape,
but bear yourself as one already dead.
Haunting the world, all things are born anew:
witness our dying star, the way it bleeds
into these rediscovered waves, and raise
your mind to praise the cruelty of the gods,
without whom there would be nothing to love,
nothing to spur our terror of the grave.

III.
Because all those who seek the truth of life
will come away with empty heads and hands, 
come– let us view the gods themselves as dead. 
For that which moves the tides, the moons, and grows
the olive on the branch, child in the womb, 
will speak to us no more than corpses can,
unless through the imperfect tongues of man.

(originally published in Mundus Artium Journal)



The Clarinet

A man plays clarinet in Vondelpark
in snatches– a soft, playful, mournful dirge,
marrying the merry with the dark.

Its weeping laugh, the bittersweetened mark
of my old tribe– What Jew’s heart wouldn’t surge
to hear this clarinet in Vondelpark? 

This woodwind has an all-too-human spark:
mere breath transformed, desires dance and merge,
marrying the merry with the dark. 

Amidst the blackbird’s song and yorkie’s bark,
Jerusalem and Athens here converge
when men play clarinet in Vondelpark:

Both peoples have this tragic sense– this stark
and plaintive sound which says: light will emerge
by marrying the merry with the dark.

Nature is not enough. No loon or lark
can satisfy our spiritual urge.
A man plays clarinet in Vondelpark,
marrying the merry with the dark. 

(originally published in Literary Matters)



The Birth of Lyric

“If you die, then you shall make the sweetest song.” – Hymn to Hermes

What I call “art” will call for suffering,
the baby said, and scooped the tortoise up.

He tore its limbs and scooped some tortoise up
to meet his lips, and scraped the hollow shell.

The godling chewed, and mused: This hollow shell
of mortal life requires pains for beauty.

This spoil of death (what does this mean for Beauty?)
he wove about with reeds and guts and hide

and pulled the strings just so– so as to hide
all mathematic chaos. Harmony

resounded in the air; in harmony
his hands and voice brought song into the world:

I bring the gift of song into your world,
for I have heard your calls of suffering.

(originally published in The Classical Outlook)



Lactic Ode

First taste we know and nourisher of life, 
the essence of the mammal and the mother,
quarry of bone and skeletally white, 
erupting from the gorgeous breast and udder, 
elixir of warm-hearted things that love, 
the matriarch of butter, luscious cream,
and holey cheeses, sacred marriage of 
mammal and microbe, rennet, mold, and steam. 
That firmament which holds our hopes, our claim 
that we are not alone, that we live on, 
is dubbed Her Way, and, by another name,  
She claims all galaxies— indeed, the dawn
of human dreams was fed by ‘lactic stars 
assuring us this world was Mom, was ours.

(originally published in Rust & Moth)



Dithyrambos

Adapted from the Latin of Horace III.25

Where now, where next, Bacchus? Filled with you, 
filled with your blood, reborn in your god-mind, 
what trees shall we run through, what cavern depths
besides my brain’s own branches, my own skull? 
What torchlit glades where pale, masked horrors lurk
shall I domesticate with deathless song,
such song as shall reverberate beyond
the stars into the endless halls of God?
A song that, like a star, shall light the void
a thousand years after its source is dead–
a strange new fire never yet beheld.

As when a sleep-starved bacchante stares agape
out from the summit where the god has led her
upon the brilliant ice of Thracian glaciers, 
the mighty Hebrus churning down below,
and Rhodope: a land untrod, uncharted,
save by the tracks of wine-crazed savages, 
so do I gaze upon these empty forests, 
these lonesome rivers singing out to no one, 
bewildered, trembling with fear and joy.

Great lord of panthers, maenads mind-dissolved  
who bend and break great ash trees with bare hands,
in your name nothing tiny, trite, or tame
shall trickle from my pen— no, nothing mortal.  
I revel in the sweetness of your peril,
entwining vines about my wind-swept brow
and following the god to lands unknown.

(originally published in The Classical Outlook)



Sudoku

for example; crosswords, metaphysics,
and riddles, doodles, higher math, all else
that shows delight in order without end;
these are the ways we imitate the God,
for whom creation’s always recreation.
But art aspires—art is only human.

Not that there’s something wrong with being human.
We sometimes think so, using metaphysics
to demonstrate some flaw in our creation,
as if our proper home lies somewhere else,
and we, destined to be (or be with) God.
We cannot bear the thought that we may end.

But life is not our asset to defend.
The mental burden borne of being human—
that we possess the foresight of a god,
only to know we die, and find our physics
has scried the desolation of all else—
does not entitle us to judge creation

as if we knew its worth. We know creation
only as life gives us the chance. We end
(and good thing, too—all would be worthless else),
but not before we find that to be human
is to be living proof beyond dead physics
of something worthy of (not proof of) God.

And what is it we mean when we say “God”?
Not merely the brute fountain of creation,
not merely a foundation for our physics,
but something we imagine without end,
Itself imagining Itself a human,
and from this dream proceeding to all else.

And now, let us imagine something else.
Something as worthy to be called a god,
without this quaint obsession with the human.
Something which takes such joy in all creation
that nothing can be taken for its end.
Its current game involves the laws of physics—

it plays as human—and everything else.
Beyond all metaphysics, merely God:
wild Love that makes creation its own end.

(originally published in Image Journal)

The HyperTexts