THE MIROSLAV GOSPEL
ALM 92, August 2026
POETRY
Lepenski Vir
White dust rises where the rivers splice,
Limestone, Roman grit, shrapnel, clay.
Belgrade. Then glass revolved.
Lepenski Vir:
boulder split by frost.
Danube eyes watch whirlpools.
Blade scraped a throat of stone,
hands smoothed brow and mouth.
River flint, sandstone grey,
fish-eyed sentinel
centuries drowned. Stone jaws hold.
Tablet:
“Nine thousand years.”
The Danube rises.
Dupljaja God
Then I found a three-wheeled clay,
In Dupljaja's silt,
Bird-necked, sun-etched, its chassis
By hands long-spilt.
In the wet gap of the marsh,
Caked with Danube mud,
I felt the pull of water-fowl —
The waterfowl god.
Three thousand years of dark
Before the ploughshares broke
The Bronze Age urn and field,
And the driver woke.
Now stamped on plastic cards,
A ghost-wheel for the road,
The driver’s modern permit bears
This ancient, wheeled load.
Who cleft the air, the reeds
With stylized beak —
There rode upon his skirted hips
The signs they seek,
The dual-gendered bone, the spirals
Turned by every wave,
Now housed in old Belgrade,
Subsoil from the grave.
The Miroslav Gospel
I held a word that had survived the frost,
the Miroslav Gospel saved from rot and flame,
not dug from the bog’s dark, sour preservative
but kept whole inside Belgrade’s museum vaults.
Like the stone walls uncovered at Céide,
the Cyrillic ran in steady, ribbed rows
where a scribe named Gligorije squared his pen
to drive the letters deep and fence the language in.
Here, Byzantine gold leaf was hammered thin,
a country’s most vital artifact spine,
binding the East and West in a single grip.
It was a quern-stone of a different turning,
grinding the centuries down to a single page,
an artifact not drowned, but saved by breath,
where the oldest turf they ever turned was ink.
The author, Joseph Marcel, Ikhenoba is a Biochemist by profession and a passionate writer. He has published several poems, articles and stories which have been published in Amazon, Poetry South, Active Muse, Short story.net, Poem Hunters, Core Humanity Commons, Academia.edu, Writers Space Africa, Goodreads, Afri-Library and Kinsman Quarterly. Semi-finalist for Black Diaspora Award, shortlisted for Natives Award, and longlisted for Iridescence and Dr. Paul Kalanithi writing awards in 2024. He likes sports, writing and scientific researches.
Subscribe to FREE digital flip copy of the Adelaide Magazine printed edition.