Ra

[GrhmJngL]

Seamus Heaney, you say? That is quite the quill you have taken on! The flow is there, although 'machinations of a godly machine' was a stutter-step for me. It's probably machinations with machine (even though I like the word). Maybe something like, 'workings of a Godly machine.' The first line may read better as, 'Her body lies dappled in ochre-and-black' for me (in my voice). You want smoky, pertaining to smoke, not Smokey, pertaining to the Bear. You have flecked and unflecked herein. I might ditch one. What about 'smoky and marred', as I would never break that 'unslept, unkempt, unflecked' combination, ha ha. This golden gal is radiant, but I thought that RA was a male deity with the sun as his eye or body. This also creates some confusion for me (possible me alone), as she is the sun in the first 'stanza', but she steams 'from the heat of the sun' in the second part. Are the 'sun' and 'Her' one or two entities? I will have to read this again to comment further, but all in all it's a superior work. Nice!

The subject of the octave is my cat, and then the start of the sestet is referring to the Sun, which can be taken literally, or as some kind of deity (be it the "Ra" of the title some sort of pantheistic force or whatever else), or as sort of "life-force" or energy (not in a spiritual but a profane sense, as in physical/mental/emotional energy). The main intention was for this third idea to be the predominant one.

"...the mother-god, father-god, her kin(as in the Sun is the cat's kin, ie., Egyptian mythology),the one
fresh-risen and fruitful, who bears life to all
with embracing and absence, time's twist and fall(ie.the sun brings about life by coming and going, providing us with the fluctuations with which we mark time, etc.)..."

"...that awakens the healthy and taunts the unslept,
unkempt subject, the wretch, unflecked
by the chaos and passion and the warmth of the sun.."
There's sort of two ideas involved here, one in reference to the sun literally, and the other to that idea of "energy" or however you want to phrase it. The first (more literal) reading is that the passage of night to day wakes up the healthy (ie. people with a proper sleep pattern), but, for the insomniac, the sun in this case only serves to instill dread as the dawn signifies that they have stayed awake the whole night and will thus have to suffer through the next day deprived of sleep. The second (less literal) reading is that while in an normal, fully healthy person the natural fluctuations of life (from one state of being/mood/situation/period in time/etc. to another) aren't much of an issue, but in someone drained of such emotional and mental energy (because of depression or whatever), such fluctuations only seem to intensify already present suffering. This subject is intentionally contrasted with the cat, who's described as a sort of embodiment of this energy.

Also, generally, the idea of going from discussing the cat to the sun as some sort of all-providing deity was to sort of emphasize this sense of the pantheistic (in terms of belief I'm a total materialist, but I'm not trying to actually express any literal spiritual belief here).