Ancestral Voices
By Jeffrey R. Paine
Daylight fades as Earth rolls East
Darkness falls as stars emerge
Moving West in constant
Change repeating as
We have so often done
I build a fire that holds away
Darkness, fear, and mystery
As I build a fire around me
Gather ancestral spirits
And other kin
Spectral unseen sharing
As we have done
Habitual ritual fire
Contained retained
Many hundred million
Nights, generations, lives
There is no counting
Except for keeping time of
young and old children aged
They press close I feel this night
Ancestral voices I hear around me
Echoes ephemeral gatherings
Future past and present
At first, one must be quiet
Quite still to hear
Their voices carried
Sigh of the wind
Crack of flame
They sing with me this night
So long a time it’s been
But each night every night
Ancestral voices I have heard
Hear join them chanting singing
Clapping stomping drumming
Echo through the distant
Time chanting out our
Reasons stories singing out
Our rhyming voices raised in joyful song
repeating illumination
repeating revelation
repeating the common call
the constant story in all time
Ancestral voices are one sometimes
United in our strength
Briefly one rises above the rest
Unnamed exclaiming experience unique
Then resuming
Just unison in voices
in rhythm in rhyme
in time in mind
They sing with me each night
Each night of what they did
What they knew
What I do and know
And what those who one day
Come later to the fire?
Are they heard as well?
I do not know,
And what it all should mean
To them and to me and other
Times I do not understand
And sometimes they do not
Understand my chant my song
But continuing, we sing on
Come then! the voices call
A million generations deep
So primordial dating
back to sea warm shores before
our ancestors could conceive
of fire tamed on the eve
Come then!
Let us immerse ourselves
In the dream entropic taking
In this the story we now know:
Long Long Ago...
In the Dreamtime...
In the Beginning...
Once Upon a Time...
So then engage
Our egos in the dream
Chaotic as ancestors have
In unbroken sequence done for ages
Innumerable linked by fire
Perception ritual genes myth
A common thread a story
Our shared humanity
Ancestral voices chanting
Today in the distant
Time both past and
Present and once to be
Poem endless of emotions
Sounds with colors
Mixed in fluid
Motions falling
Leaves bare trees warming
Sun grown forth across
The land we are living
Once again we are
Ancestral voices they
Sing with me of life
Of what they did
What I do and
What it all could mean
One day of generations
Chanting in the distant
Time chanting out our reasons
Chanting out our dream divine
Poemjockey
Jeffrey R. Paine
Inspiration t’was hidden
and the writhing poems
did not rhyme and meter
on the page
esoteric were the daffodils
by indolent poets, outraged!
“Beware the Ides of March, my boy
the days that bite, the weeks that pass!
Beware the baleful springtime weather,
and shun the frumious Equinox!”
He took his vorpal pen in hand,
long time the perfect verse he sought,
so rested he front the dun TV
and sat awhile with writers’ block
But as he uffish sat and thought
the month of March
with Ides ablaze
went wiffling by without his knowing;
passing swiftly as a day.
One two, one two,
and through and through,
the vorpal pen went snicker-snak;
he wrote it deft, and with it read,
went galumphing back.
“And hast thou harvested
the perfect parody?
Read to your friends, my beamish boy!
Oh Frabjous Day! Caloo! Calay!”
he chortled in his joy.
T’was brilliant,
and the writhing poem
did rhyme and meter
on the page;
esoteric were the daffodils,
by insolent poets, dismayed!
(With no apologies at all to Lewis Carroll and his “Jabberwocky.” An earlier version appeared in my 2003 chapbook; revisions here were made on September 11, 2020.)
Parodies
Jeffrey R. Paine, 2003
I think that I shall never see
A poem unripe for parody
A poem whose turgid verse in pressed
Against the normal flow of breath
A poem of self-indulgent bray
And set with flow’ry phrases, say
A poem that may make us swear
An oath to tear out all our hair
Upon whose meter ‘s grammar slain
Whose force-ed rhythm gives us pain
Yes poems are writ by fools like me
But most improve as parody
(With thanks to Alfred Joyce Kilmer, whose poem “Trees” was, indeed, ripe.)
Prelude to the Soundtrack of My Weekend
By Jeffrey R. Paine
August 26, 2011
A week of stress
And infernal internal politics.
Get me on the road,
Let me unwind somehow:
Jackson saturates my soul,
Robbie guides me on the red road
Under an Indigo sky, the Girls in retrospect…
Yes! There’s no delirium as
Joni brings me full circle
In a game down miles and miles
Of white-line aisles
On the free, free way.
No regrets, and I
Write these words while I’m rolling
Homeward I’m feeling fine,
‘Til Jackson reminds me once more
I’m running on empty
Running behind
And then sitting
Soon, oh soon
I’m so close to the edge
While the passing traffic shivered in the heat
And she said from right beside me
“Why do you always run out of gas?”
I said, “I dunno…
But it sure sucks
to start a weekend this way.”
Magdalene
Jeffrey R. Paine
Magdalene: Before
She wonders why she is drawn
And quartered
From every quarter
Taken advantage of
Looked down upon
Mistreated so
By every woman and
Every passing man
(Even those
Especially those
Who come to her
Seeking the one thing
She has left to offer)
Why such an object of scorn?
Once in a great while
Memories climb backwards
Out the pit of hell on earth
That circumstances and abuse
Occasional bad choices
An inflexible society
Have judged her into,
And she remembers an age
Of innocence and how
One hand-carved wooden
Music box shattered
Her life.
As it usually happens in February
A woman robed in rags
The silk gown of her wedding
Adjusting the sheets
Preparing herself for another
Invasion of the flesh
Resolves again
To rebuild it.
Magdelene: At
Though she hoped
She had descended already
To the lowest depths
She dared not hope.
But then the time came
And the press of bodies
Clean and unclean
Blessed and unblessed
Saved and unsaved
Flowed and parted
And now at the front
Instead of the midst
She feared
“What if he comes to me?
Oh, God! What if he does not?”
She turned to flee
Disappear into that damned
Up flood of humanity
With a heavy burden borne
To drown she did not
Deserve to waver
Much beyond what she’d known
But now the crowd would
Not let her pass
As he approached
So plain a man so simple
So kind a man who
Would not stoop for displaced
Souls but did so anyway.
“Come here,” he said
She stood down
Cast hoping now to die
This instant
So she could not be saved
And yet he approached her
Willingly with a
Smile laughter on his lips
“Who condemns you?” he asked.
When she did not reply, he said,
“Are hated souls among you?”
And some in the crowd
Said yes.
“God does not hate,”
He said to the gathered crowd
“For the Father knows all things
God does not condemn you.
I do not condemn you.
Why then do you condemn you?”
And with that
His hand upon her head
“You are healed,” he said
“Go and sin no more.”
He turned and walked
Away his disciples
And the crowd following
Flowing around her now
Keeping a certain distance
As she stood transfixed
Transfigured
Illuminated
Purified
As the flood receded
Giving her space
Clarity
And she, too, began
To follow.
Magdalene: After
“Have you heard nothing
That He said?”
She asked again
With Simon and Peter
The rock stood
“He called you--
Fisherman and Mason
Laborer and Assassin--
And thereby completed his task
But all that will
Be forgotten because
You did not listen!”
Now the one Jesus loved
And others pause to listen
Within their guilt and grief.
“Because you did not
see him arise, shake off his
heavy burden borne at this place
of the skull triumphant,
now you doubt all
he said and did.”
Silence answered.
“I will go to the tomb,” she said
“While children climb trees
And you wail in your
Betrayal and I
Who have been turned
On from every quarter
Rectified
Will see first
His destiny descend.”