The Chronicles of the Pharaoh's Daughter
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THE CHRONICLES OF THE PHARAOh’s DAUGHTER THE CHRONICLES OF THE PHARAOh’s DAUGHTER Poems of Love, Loss, and Rebirth DAVINA RHINE iUniverse, Inc. Bloomington The Chronicles of the Pharaoh’s Daughter Poems of Love, Loss, and Rebirth Copyright © 2012 by Davina Rhine. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews. iUniverse books may be ordered through booksellers or by contacting: iUniverse 1663 Liberty Drive Bloomington, IN 47403 www.iuniverse.com 1-800-Authors (1-800-288-4677) Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them. Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Thinkstock are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only. Certain stock imagery © Thinkstock. ISBN: 978-1-4759-2817-4 (sc) ISBN: 978-1-4759-2819-8 (hc) ISBN: 978-1-4759-2818-1 (ebk) Printed in the United States of America iUniverse rev. date: 07/12/2012 Rebellion Press logo designed by Juan Leon of Firelion Graphix. This edition published by arrangement with Rebellion Press. Contents THE PHARAOH The Holy War Take the Sword to Your Belly.......................................................... 1 Caligula ............................................................................................... 3 Where is my Abram? ........................................................................ 5 My Athena .......................................................................................... 8 I am but a Pharaoh’s Daughter ....................................................... 9 My Nike ............................................................................................ 10 The Second Coming ........................................................................ 11 Our Fallen Empire ........................................................................... 12 The Last Rites ................................................................................... 14 THE KING Death Before Dishonor My Five Bloodstains ....................................................................... 21 The King and Me . Tragedy ....................................................... 32 Daddy, When Are You Comin’ Home? ....................................... 34 Addiction: The Pain of Angels . ................................................ 35 Genealogy and Gynecology .......................................................... 38 THE POSSESSION Date Rape and the Ashipu My Green Chair ............................................................................... 45 Dancing Skeletons........................................................................... 46 The Roller Girls ............................................................................... 47 A Dream within a Dream: Erotica, Violence, and Fear. ............ 49 What Happened to the High Rise? ............................................... 60 Self-Centered Selfish ....................................................................... 62 The Animal Instinct ........................................................................ 63 THE SINNERS Sex, Science, and Aging Budgets Where Does Green Leave Us? ........................................................ 71 Hell’s Kitchen . ............................................................................ 72 The Forbidden Lovers Door . An Intimate Civil War. ........... 74 For Troy, My Heart Sails . ......................................................... 77 The Chains of Cleopatra and the Snakes of Separation ........... 80 The Girl in Blue Jeans Clinging to a Cross . ........................... 82 The Magnolia Trees at Midnight .................................................. 85 Not Once, Not Ever ......................................................................... 86 The Church ....................................................................................... 87 The Pearl Affair ............................................................................... 89 Ball and Chain ................................................................................. 90 You Know ......................................................................................... 91 The Garden of the Gods.................................................................. 93 THE CAPRICORNS AND THE CANCERS Burn the House Down If You Must I Don’t ............................................................................................. 101 Cinderella and her Pumpkin Man .............................................. 103 The Backyard Amazon ................................................................. 104 Innocence ........................................................................................ 106 What happened to the Cancers? Finding the Aristocrat in me. ................................................ 111 Repentance ..................................................................................... 116 Crayons Spilling on the Floor ..................................................... 117 Aves Love ....................................................................................... 119 THE LOVERS Starvation and Salvation Fated Muse ..................................................................................... 125 The Yellow Gold ............................................................................ 127 Cryptic Lipstick—I Love You ..................................................... 129 The Human Heart .......................................................................... 132 One Thousand Nights ................................................................... 133 Lovesick in the Bottom of a Glass ............................................. 134 Love in Pompeii ............................................................................ 136 The Angels Have Come Knockin’ ................................................ 139 THE QUEEN We All Walk the Path Again The Goddess’s Table ..................................................................... 145 Medusa: The Legacy of the Crown ............................................. 148 Evicting Cyril ................................................................................ 151 The Great Goddess Temple: The Beginning and the End, the Future and the Past. ............................................ 156 The Modern Athena ...................................................................... 162 For Daddy And His Torturers Both Genealogical And Institutional For His Birthed Victims And For Vietnam And All Its Undoing And Wrong. • This collection, The Chronicles of the Pharaoh’s Daughter, is best enjoyed with a heavy, dense red wine preferably with hints of walnut, espresso, dark chocolate and cherry. You will want to occupy a barren room lit with candles perfuming the air with hints of frankincense, lavender, sage, and vanilla. You will want to fill the space with the musical heart-cries of Sinead O’ Connor, Tracy Chapman, Morrissey and the like. You will need room to scream, cry, crumble, and wail and to be resurrected. That is how I lived and worked for several years while mourning my father, my marriage, and the loss of my youth that was impeded by my upcoming middle-age. The Chronicles are a passionate, ironic, and symbolic collection that blends antiquity, history, memory, reincarnation, wealth, poverty, sex, love, life, birth and afterlife. It captures a periled time in my life where my soul was encapsulated into the outer realm of unconscious living. I was a ghost doing my job and chores. These poems were drafted between the ages of twenty-seven and thirty-years-old. I was living in reincarnation over-and-over, torn between heaven and hell. The child who lost the romanticized dream of her father to his death and their broken reality, the daydreamer lover who wondered in the wilderness of temptation for far too long, to come home feeling both betrayed and the being the betrayer, and to finally emerge both revenged and avenged, but redeemed in her little family unit of three; my little family that serves as the church, the bath, the fire, the light, the way, to me. - xi - • Davina Rhine • These poems dance where I danced, and fell where I had fallen, and then got up on their own, finally, just like me. During these surreal years flavored by wine and records, there were many friends trying to help me find the way again, as a daughter mourned her father, and a woman mourned love. In retrospect, though painful, this was a very lyrical, dreamy time in my life—robust with meaning, but nonetheless fragile and perhaps decadent. How I managed to keep my micro-managed job at the time, and keep some sense of sensibility and routine going for my son, I don’t know. My nighttime hours were filled with Elvis records, candles, mythology, and a spouse trying to hold me and understand my poetic regression—even while we were both living imprisoned in different and numerous ways. What you will find in this collection is less political, or idealistic, like my younger pre-twenty-five-years-old