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.
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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 work/self but it is more gnawing, primitive, and raw. I am an eloquent primate with a burning passion that frequently gets me into trouble in the ‘real’ world of rules and micromanagement, and cloaked, wealthy indecency that pours hot from those on top of the jungle. I am a lion who roars—even when she tries to keep her mouth closed, so that her den is safe. What I emerged with after wandering through the Garden of Eden, was a profound love of archaeology, an inner-strength redefined, and an eclipsed longing for living and loving while struggling for a just world. Serene Chaos may be my wet nurse, but the hope for a new Amazon generation is my goddess muse and my calling.
In love, uprising, and for being human, Davina Rhine
- xii - The Pharaoh
The Holy War
• The Chronicles of the Pharaoh’s Daughter •
Take the Sword to Your Belly
How can you expect your daughter, to give her life in your death? Will your grave be so selfish and cruel? The father whose name fails to love me Even now as skeletons dance behind me Waving flagrantly with their mockery Our chains of marriage bind me
You beg me to take the sword to my belly Why do you beckon me to die to be with you? Can you not at least this once meet with me in life?
Your spirit doesn’t know me, your soul fails me It is your memory that taunts me You won’t even hold me in death Big girls don’t cry unless daddy ignores their existence
“Take the sword to your belly darling daughter And maybe, just maybe, with the ultimate sacrifice I will invite you into my dwelling . . .”
My weeping denies my son, your forsaken grandson Your seed so shallow . . . should it be allowed to carry on?
- 1 - • Davina Rhine •
My sorrow hangs around my neck like ancient perfumed beads Suddenly the gods’ hands tighten around me Bathed in your blood I hold your heart in my hands O’ Daddy,
Your are cold and cruel Your turn your back to me again You won’t have me unless I die to be with you. You have betrayed me again in death as in life. My heart gives and forgives, again and again Just to be broken by you
Your anguished shadow tells me, “Lovely daughter forsake all to be with me . . . take the sword to your belly.”
- 2 - • The Chronicles of the Pharaoh’s Daughter •
Caligula
I hear your voice and feel your arms twisting beneath my feet Groping my ankles from the grave Our forsaken love buried so deep
Father, shall I take you into my bed?
You loved me once but not more since the moment you touched me Our sweet little secret
Your eyes closed in bittersweet trance gods and demons dancing in your head Love, lust, heroin, swimming in your bed
Mating in ritual as Caligula and his serpentine sister The womb of madness brings forth destiny
Are the bonds of brethren not the purest? For bloodshed and grief?
Father, shall I take you into bed? We are after all are our own royalty
- 3 - • Davina Rhine •
To carry your spirit over from the edge, back from the dead? Please be with me my father dearest Taste the lips of damned indifference
The winged angels and haloed lions that dressed and undressed in our chamber Bringing us together, so sweet . . .
The agony echoes in the chamber of my disillusions, we weren’t meant to be.
I have burned our words into our grave marker Engulfed in flames sailing on the Roman Sea
The reliefs around the temples of justice are carved from my grief. My heart carried by heavy hands . . . waiting to be with you
Father lie with me be with me For I am naked in a blighted nightmare.
Father, shall I take you into my bed?
- 4 - • The Chronicles of the Pharaoh’s Daughter •
Where is my Abram?
I am your lover, your descendant, your foul I walk in your footsteps knowing I have loved none . . . until I have loved you now
Your abandonment molested me You casted me out to the desert sands barren and dry . . . Will not your semen refresh me father? Will it not quench my thirst?
Will your god not spare me of your burden? Your fate is not mine alone
Father, you deny me I am the child of your folly, your lack of faith You did not believe, I was the chosen one before or after What was your reason then old man to sleep with my mother?
You harlot Father, you are my whore
You used the “God of gods,” to justify your adultery
- 5 - • Davina Rhine •
You deny me old man But yet in the desert I die looking only for you
December 14, 2005 My lover, my father, I learned had died, almost a year before
The man who had become my Zeus The man who begot me in his slumber and forgot me the morning after Where is my Abram? Where is my Moses?
My sea boils in sin and blood It parts in anger Your sin, my blood, my father
Where are my brothers? Where are my Isaacs and my Jacobs? Dead and gone
The Patriarch’s breath bore me, and left me lying nude “I am female!” he said “God has forsaken me! ~ He promised me a son!”
- 6 - • The Chronicles of the Pharaoh’s Daughter •
“Rape her and ravage her . . . for what do I care? How can I be the Father of Nations? when my only daughter is a girl?”
I search for god for you us blindly in our golden Egypt
Father you have enslaved me.
- 7 - • Davina Rhine •
My Athena
I am, where I don’t belong the land of the dead Confused and dumbfounded, by the way of the living It’s a sad mystery . . . how do they go on? Civil wars erupt around me My Athena guards me.
- 8 - • The Chronicles of the Pharaoh’s Daughter •
I am but a Pharaoh’s Daughter
I am but a Pharaoh’s Daughter misled by majesty and disbelief He proclaimed himself god, god of all Yet, I was not him I was not born of his Egypt I am, but a mother, whose red lips foretold my betrayal I disobeyed
I questioned him, the Almighty
I am but a Pharaoh’s Daughter relished in gold, as the ancient mysteries unfold
My arm of rulership severed in my tomb of denial
Casting me aside in history, I am but a Pharaoh’s Daughter.
- 9 - • Davina Rhine •
My Nike
Her statue won battles . . . Her wings flung to the high sea Not barren was she, as the sons of sacrifice laid at her feet But did she really wage wars and beckon misery with her penchant for speed and victory? Rumor would have it so, although she was Athena’s right-hand man?
History tells us that the fighters who met her, met her in death from ancient Greek sea battles to American missile systems Men forsaking their mothers, to wage war for the earth’s bounty?
Would a woman send her child to fight a man’s war? I think not
Women know the price of men It is their heads revered in folklore Their heads sprung forth from Nike’s womb, The snakes coil like demons under the angel’s breath And war was both their beast and their breast, fevered in deceit and disbelief
Nike was the sea’s final plea for peace.
- 10 - • The Chronicles of the Pharaoh’s Daughter •
The Second Coming
PREMATURE Everything is premature Your ejaculation that gave birth to me Your arms that failed to embrace me I am twenty-nine and I am still without a father Now that you are dead, Your second coming means nothing to me
Ashes to ashes, and dust to dust, our love is nothing Not even promised nor protected by Christ, or his mother, or his father
Why did your grave catch me by my ankles? Your death fills me in our infancy
Blood doesn’t bind us, bread doesn’t fill us, brethren do not deceive us wine only delays us
Your second coming father, and just like all the times of my childhood, you again failed to show up.
- 11 - • Davina Rhine •
Our Fallen Empire
They look to the West waiting for the Emperor’s descent or for Gabriel’s triumphant cry
What befalls a nation befalls a child
What becomes of a nation becomes of a girl
The flowers have killed their seed, though the sun shines and the bees sing Fate, war, and bloodshed Children lie in wait on the senate floor
The earth is barren Our destiny flat
The baths have lost their luxury As rape and vengeance fill them with humanity’s misery
O’ Rome My Rome
How dare you steal my daughter from me! How dare you think your empire will last in light of our rape? Our stolen seed!
- 12 - • The Chronicles of the Pharaoh’s Daughter •
Yet my love beckons for affection, yearns to know those who fathered me!
The empire falls just like us My love is timeless your love corrupt
Blood splattered on the rocks I am but a sacrificed child
Swimming lost in the sea, with Minos of Titus sick with grief
Toxins fill me, swelling my belly under my misery
Fear is love Love is fear of never being loved
Are we but the split of Nero’s insanity? Beheaded we fall Crosses illuminate our passing in the night unsacred to all but god
My Father, my emperor, you have forsaken me I demand vengeance now, restore my fertility.
- 13 - • Davina Rhine •
The Last Rites
The golden halo engulfs me If only I had riches, not rags I too could be nobility
Then maybe god would spare me my grief
If I had as much riches as the child wants for love Then I would be welcome into the Kingdom of Heaven The stained “Kingdom of God,” or at least into yours . . . right father?
Our church frowns You mated with me (As the corrupted fathers and priests normally do) I am not a slave I am not a peasant I am not your wife I am your daughter, a daughter of the church
I have defied you by surviving you I have defied the church by demanding that you behave as a father
- 14 - • The Chronicles of the Pharaoh’s Daughter •
My father, even if it is too late in our last rites . . . because you are beyond forgiving, dead and lost Sacrificed to science and the realm of the unloved by the medical examiner I now bury you . . .
- 15 -
The King
Death Before Dishonor
• The Chronicles of the Pharaoh’s Daughter •
My Five Bloodstains
This is the story I was never suppose to write. I was maybe perhaps destined to tell it one day to my son when I was in my fifties, but certainty not in my twenties. It is 01-06-05. My father has been dead to me since 12-15-05. Perhaps he had been dead to me longer than that, but I was in denial. So many songs have become my father’s song. I have listened to Nothing Compares to You by Sinead everyday that has passed. Counting my days from one to fourteen then time stopped . . . At fourteen days if the person was still alive, you could call. You could write. You could beg. You could proclaim your love and forgiveness in the attempt of reconciliation. It has passed 14 days, nothing. No phone call. No knocks at the door. No, “I really fucked up and I am sorry.” No spiritual encounters with dead. In fact, I have to keep living as if I am not dead, and I am starting to get angry. I have to keep working, loving, moving and smiling. My three days of bereavement at work are up. I guess that’s better than none considering how employers nowadays won’t even pay for sick leave, or pensions, or maternity leave, if they ever really did. I have been begging and asking for time to sing and write, to get it all out, maybe more than once. Every time I snatch that moment Corben wakes up, or some interruption occurs. I have done everything. All the leg work to find those guilty in my father’s case. I have interrogated police officers, medical examiners, sergeants and detectives. All who blame the other party for what happened and what didn’t happen that should have. How do you not notify the family of the deceased? You had a license, you had my police report for a missing person,
- 21 - • Davina Rhine • you knew we were here! His body probed and prodded by city students before being burned and discarded. He didn’t donate his body to science, nor did I . . . you stole him from us and gave him away as a city write-off! I have arranged the private memorial where his ashes lie, without our consent, or his wishing. I have arranged the fought for military service and burial he wanted even though all we have left to bury are his DNA bloodstains saved by the coroner’s office, my five bloodstains. How I wish I could impregnate myself with them; to give birth to my father again. To right the wrong—the wrong that was his life. It becomes ours—the sins of his forbearers and ours.
“Fire on Babylon!” —Sinead O’Connor
My fourteen days have been work, work, and work; all necessary work. I want my private moment with my father; just one more. I am finally accepting he won’t be here, but I am damn it. I mourn my father now for everything I wanted from him but he could not give. His lack of giving however was not meant to be an excuse to deny him proper burial. Now his fight is mine. Never will the weary sleep again for I am the ghost who will come banging every night, demanding justice and answers. Excuses are no more than half sincere apologies because they were caught not doing their job. They chose not do their job because he was a homeless veteran, they were indifferent and negligent. Their job cost my family a complete farewell to the man we both loved and hated. I now ask my father to wait for me. But he waited over a year and I did not come. I was hard. My heart believed he was off frolicking in Kansas. I couldn’t believe he was dead without a
- 22 - • The Chronicles of the Pharaoh’s Daughter • word. No word in over three years. Now the violins and fiddles play for me. I have begged for the chance to hold him and kiss him all the ways his own mother never did. But god has denied me. He has forsaken me again. I am afraid my father will never forgive me. I gave up on him and he lay dead for over a year and I didn’t know. I did not know. But I didn’t look. His ashes lay cold and wet in a pool of the ashes of the many. The many are those that Dallas County and thirty-seven surrounding counties buried for either their families couldn’t afford burial, or the city didn’t do their job in notifying kin, as in my case, and needed to get rid of the body—the ashes of the deceased, which are unknown, or unclaimed, and lie with him. His ashes sat cold waiting for a warm hand to hold them. By the time my hand found them, they were denied to me. Now my tears only wet the ground he once walked on.
My love songs to my son have somehow become my grief songs for my father. Love is so innocent and pure no matter what the misgivings or trespasses that occurred, or may occur. I would never love my son any less even if he broke my heart, over and over. I would always hold him, clothe him, and feed him and pray for him. I would always fight for him. My father broke my heart and I realize at twenty-nine-years-of-age that I love him no less. Life and birth and death are all connected.
I imagine my fathers rage when looking down from heaven. Was he entitled to our love and grief? No. Was he entitled for us to be found so we could make the choice and decision? Yes, but it was denied to him. Yes. It was denied him for a year and eleven days. The government stole his humanity in Vietnam and denied him his dignity in death.
- 23 - • Davina Rhine •
I just want my daddy. My daddy is not a “Zoo exhibit or a football to kick around” (Sinead O’Connor—Red Football). He was legally homeless though, so he was treated as trash. As a consequence, so was his family. But like the Sinead song Red Football, “I have every intention of leaping up and getting you.” I will. The city will regret the day they walked all over me, by walking all over my father.
“I am sailing on this terrible ocean.” Sinead continues to sing about me, for me.
The piano keys strike along with the computer keyboard keys, all in grief and pain. I almost believe I am the one playing the piano and singing. For so many years of my life I was blinded. I planned my father’s tombstone when I was twenty-one and was convinced he was dead. It was all the Vietnam’s War fault—all of it—the abuse, the neglect, the failure, the homelessness, the addiction, the alcoholism. It was all because of what he survived and what he had to in Vietnam as an awarded marksman—he was just a little over eighteen when he got his first award for killing people. He had enrolled as an abused and homeless child, homeless since he was twelve. Now I see my father as a child, which I never did before. Oh god, “If I could just try to love him all the more . . .” (Sinead) If I had seen him this way before death, maybe I could have “Helped him face the future hopefully surrounded by despair. He won’t ask for your sympathy, but surely you should care.”(Sinead) Now as a child I understand him, because I understood myself. “All babies are born saying god’s name, over and over . . .” (Sinead)
His own parents neglected him and starved him. In the words of the medical examiner in regards to my dad’s family background
- 24 - • The Chronicles of the Pharaoh’s Daughter • that I disclosed to him, “They loved having children, they just didn’t like teenagers.” My father’s own mother was so cruel she wouldn’t even hug him. She taunted him for being tongue-tied. She kicked him out at age twelve. He was old enough to work and feed himself she asserted. He was kicked out with some of his brothers. She had twelve children.
“All babies are crying, for no one remembers god name . . .” —Sinead
Her evil killed my father who in turn killed me/that’s why I want to hold him so bad. Not as a daughter to a father, but a mother to a child. The way I love my son, is the way he deserved to be loved. I want his rebirth so he can experience what love and beauty is. All he found in his life was rejection, abuse and murder, legally sanctified murder, then death. Babies and children are so precious. It only takes a few us to ruin them and generations to come. My grandmothers and grandfathers sins stained my father who in turn stained me and my two sisters, who in turn stained their children. I am the only one who has been able to break the cycle of abuse and neglect on the first round. God be with me.
I hear my father’s songs everyday. They scream at me. They call to me. They are sung out loud. I drive to work hoping someone will overhear my death songs: “I am stretched on your grave,” (Sinead) just so that for one moment I could drop the smile and tell them my grief. My father deserves our recognition. He died for it.
“The sins all lead to you, my love, my love. I am waiting for you.” —Sinead
- 25 - • Davina Rhine •
I have rewrapped my grief and I have placed it everywhere. Hoping my father will find the pieces and his soul will come to me. One last supper, one last cup of coffee, one last shot of whiskey, one last chance for him to tell me something, and for me to tell him everything. I am still waiting. It’s been twenty-two days, but it seems like three.
“I have a terrible broken heart; you were born on the day my mother was buried. My grief.”—Sinead
I was named after my father. I was the boy he always wanted. They considered naming me Davina Ernestine Rhine. Instead I was named Davina Lynn Rhine. His name was David Ernest Rhine. My mother has often wondered if I was a boy if things would have been different. She never told me this until I asked at twenty-nine-years-of-age. I guess I always knew. She thinks they would have been different, perhaps.
“Crying out to the earth with tears both hot and wild. Calling out for the girl, I loved as a child.”—Sinead
We buried my father’s DNA tissue/blood sample on my birthday; it was fitting since I was his namesake. We buried him on the day I was born. I am his justice seeker; he just didn’t know it when I was born. I would grow up to redeem his death for him, or to at least try to. The detective assigned my fathers case on 12-04-04 was on vacation from then until 01-04-05. My father’s body was released for county disposition on 12-22-04. No one even looked in on him.
“I go out every night and sleep for days . . . since you took your love away.”—Sinead
- 26 - • The Chronicles of the Pharaoh’s Daughter •
He was my father. He was supposed to someday redeem himself. God stole that chance from me. I hate god. I hope he breaks into a million little pieces and blows against the winds, scattered to all four seasons to be devoured by the earth. He fucked me over both in life and death. My father was given a shitty hand in life, and he therefore gave us a shitty hand in life. But a shitty hand in death too?
“Tell me baby where did I go wrong?”—Sinead
We contemplated, “Mommy, what was war?” or “Your Three Lions Love You,” and finally, “Heaven is here on Earth,” for his tombstone. Twenty-four character letters could not incorporate what we wanted to say: which was a mixture of Sylvia Plath’s poem, Daddy, and our bittersweet love songs. Our hopes never realized and then ultimately denied. Well mostly my bitter sweet love songs. My two sisters righteously despised him, and my oldest sister knew the worst of him. He was a wife-beater and a child-beater. We didn’t know if we should laugh, or scream, as we read Daddy over his makeshift gravesite.
“For the first time, I feel like your mine.”
“I will never wash these clothes. I want to keep the stains. Your blood to me is precious, nor will I spill it in vain.”—Sinead
I heard this Sinead song for the first time, the day I went to pick up my fathers last “remains.” A blood stained DNA tissue sample taken post-mortem. I never knew this would by my farewell to my father. The medical examiner supervisor helped me fold it, and tie green satin ribbon around it. Our hands touched. The dead and the finder of the dead’s living, who didn’t look for us. Silence. We are both guilty and wrong, but in so many different
- 27 - • Davina Rhine • ways. I asked him if he could tie bows. His gift wrapper had moved out, so had mine. He died when I was five. He just didn’t know yet, nor did I.
“If Heaven is here on Earth . . . I have seen spirits. I have met angels.”—Tracy Chapman
It was my father.
His blood soaked wings gave birth to me. He was my temple and my church. How I worshipped his Jesus-like feet and yearned for him every day of my life. Like most crucified saints no one knows until years later who they were and what they have done for the world.
“The whole world is broke and aint worth fixing. Too much pain and too much suffering. That’s why we have to start all over and make a new beginning.”—Tracy Chapman
I made a new beginning the day I had my son. I just hoped someday my father would catch on. I forgave him all his trespasses and neglect . . . you weren’t a father, but now you can be a good grandfather. My prayer went unheard and unanswered, my forgiveness ignored.
“We can break the cycle and break the chains. We can start all over in the new beginning.”—Tracy Chapman
The last time I saw my father alive was November of 2004. My son and I just left the Quilt Exhibit at the African American Museum. I was still so mad . . . I saw him at the bus stop at Peak and Main St. I drove right past him. I know he saw me, for I saw him. A year, a month, and 15 days later, I sat in the same parking lot
- 28 - • The Chronicles of the Pharaoh’s Daughter • weeping. That moment in time will haunt me for the rest of my life. It was my chance to say both hello and goodbye. Everything I have done this past year . . . “and my father was dead.”
I took my family to Disneyland, “and my father was dead.” I celebrated Jason’s birthday, “and my father was dead.” I bought a house, “and my father was dead.” I celebrated Corben’s 4th birthday, “and my father was dead.” I bled, “and my father was dead.” I cried and screamed, “And my father was dead.” He was dead.
He had been dead over a year. Twelve menstruations later. Twelve life cycles, “and he was dead.”
Full moons and blazing suns, “and he was dead.” Wars and women’s abuse, “and he was dead.” Mothers killing their children, “and he was dead.” Fathers abandoning their children, “and he was dead.”
Vietnam veterans protesting the Bush-Iraq war and supporting Kerry, “and he was dead.” A new president election, “and he was dead.”
New essays, “and he was dead.” A new tattoo, “and he was dead.”
“It’s only smoke and ashes baby.”—Tracy Chapman
As I listen to both Sinead and Tracy Chapman, I do hope for a way to rekindle our relationship, a relationship between the living and the dead. I tried to wash myself of my father so bad
- 29 - • Davina Rhine • when I was in third grade; I had actually convinced myself that Elvis was my father. And now I dream of bathing in his memories, of which many I never had—but dreamt of. I walked like Elvis, I talked like Elvis, and I looked like Elvis. I was his kid. He was already dead, so he couldn’t be taken from me unlike the living and breathing father I had, sort of; father by rights only.
“I was so blinded by devotion; I thought all your lies were true.” —Tracy Chapman
It was in third grade after seeing Elvis and Me that I realized who my real father was. I cried, kicked and wept. He was still alive and didn’t do anything to be my father. Now I go downtown to claim his blood stains, the police reports, and all the information stored there that the Medical Examiner neglected to look at, including: my father’s legal rights and his request for a military burial. Instead they blew his ashes into a sea of the unknown, the unmarked graves of many, some twenty feet below. The rain will carry him back to the earth thru the sewer they say. I am only left with tears, songs, bloodstains, and dismay. But at least on this day I have his Marine flag, and three bullets for country, honor, and duty. He died in Vietnam. He was a ghost for his family thereafter. Or was it his mom that killed him first? Or was it the drugs and alcohol? Where was his dad? Where were the Rhine ‘advisors’ of medieval lore? Where was his generational kinship? The way he told it, we were no circle of advisors to kings ancient, but doomed by curses that predated our 20th century stepping onto American soil.
“This is the Last Day of our Acquaintance.”—Sinead
- 30 - • The Chronicles of the Pharaoh’s Daughter •
I forgave him for so much and got so little.
“Thank you for breaking my heart. Thank you for ripping it apart. Thank you for saving me. For I am now a strong, strong heart.” —Sinead
- 31 - • Davina Rhine •
The King and Me . . . Tragedy
“Only the Strong Survive . . .” As the music lights my way in yesteryear’s go round It sets me on fire On a nighttime Jupiter sky I wonder, “Why do only the strong survive?”
Have a grain a day child, Be merry you have someone to go to . . . A Salt Bath should do, to keep your demons away I know what the record sings, I never meant to hurt you more than my dad did me In so many ways we are all simply wild, or perhaps undisciplined
I know you hurt in many ways . . . but sometimes love is brutal and cold Nothing says I’m sorry when the blues are so blue . . . But I know that you’ll love me, for love is true regardless of its mix of good and bad nights But sometimes love is confused, like a rose left alone in the middle of the night, deserted in the street, ran over by festival feet Nothing goes like the song says it should, that’s why the blues are so blue,
- 32 - • The Chronicles of the Pharaoh’s Daughter •
But know I know that you love me And have been so true and relentless And when I hear Elvis sing, it’s not just of you and I “Only the strong survive . . .”
- 33 - • Davina Rhine •
Daddy, When Are You Comin’ Home?
You told me when I was a child, small, timid and blue that no tree could compare to me . . . When I was a child waiting for you you said no child could compare to me Wild as a bee to you I was true Blues and pain somehow my child heart knew
Swallowed up in your fishnets and tattoos my boy blue, where are you? I leave my tip hat behind
Daddy, when are you comin’ home? I have limousines and greens waiting for you. You told me when I was a child that I was a queen but your arm and elbow marks contradicted that . . . Addiction you worshipped, we were both fools
Daddy, when are you comin’ home? I have limousines, greens, and steamed buttered cabbage waiting for you. There is only one place you need to be . . . here with Elvis and me, and Jerry Lee.
- 34 - • The Chronicles of the Pharaoh’s Daughter •
Addiction: The Pain of Angels . . .
Damn, once again I made it two months (almost) without smoking. This means no cigarettes at all. Not even when I went out several times, including for my 30th birthday party. It seems this past weekend did me in. I planned on it being another night out without drinking and therefore no smoking, but I found myself wanting both. I found myself really wanting to have a good time (which I had plenty of without either all year so far). I felt unusually tense/wild/unsure, etc. (The driving psychological forces of addiction: nervousness and want.) I really wanted to have a damn good time, and I am a little wilder with a few beers than without. But maybe part of it is this: life has been both great and hard, and maybe I just needed to cut loose and not care about not smoking. My old best friend (of ten years) once said, “Maybe you should just smoke . . .” I have been a professional quitter for fifteen years now. Granted of the seventeen years I have been smoking, if you combined all the times of not smoking you could subtract three years-to-five from that. The reality is that I am from a family of addicts. I am fortunate that smoking is my only real vice now (and espresso, sex, music, writing, living and all the other good things in life) considering everyone on my dad’s side was that and much, much, more . . . (Addicts to narcotics and alcohol, literally the whole lot.) So, I guess as far as the gene pool is concerned, I am a definite improvement; even though, I too, had my own struggles with alcohol in my teens and early twenties, and then of course with cigarettes—which I am still struggling with. I still disappoint myself when I try so hard and yet I am my own devil’s advocate. I hate smoking and yet I love it. I feel that way about
- 35 - • Davina Rhine • many things. I am a girl of extremes and I like everything being a magnet for the other. I don’t like the flowers in the middle; I like the beautiful ones on the left, and the wilted, ragged ones on the right. The ones in the middle haven’t lived enough to be either or. I don’t want to end up like Charles Bukowski though. And there are other examples I can think of, regardless of their stumbling poetic brilliance. Addiction is truly the birthing pain of angels. On the other hand there are those (Dave Sisson from the Three Blue Teardrops amongst others) who praise whiskey and smoking as their deliverance and even wittingly attribute their musical sound to it. I can relate. Some of my best lyrical and poetic work is done after a few drinks. I can say I feel the calling of music and verse in my bones everyday, all day, but there are the occasional nights that happen once a month, on average, where I must take it a step further: I just want a beer, a smoke and ten minutes alone with my upright bass. And trust me, as a mom it is like a mini-vacation. Okay in all fairness the latter of the two (parenting and raising Corben) have been great recently, except for when I want to write, or whatever. It’s no coincidence that since the age of thirteen, smoking has represented a few moments to myself, hence the problem. (I started scalping tickets for a local ticket seller, which was a part-time gig at thirteen, in addition to school, housework. At fifteen I started working a full-time job so that I could move-out on my own.) I enjoy it and I despise it. If I don’t smoke, I literally work all day, and I have tried to remedy that too, as the problem point, but some days are so hectic or fun that you make smoking an excuse. So why am I going on about smoking? Because in a weird way smoking has always been a part of my life that allowed me a few minutes to myself and it’s a love and hate relationship, essentially addiction among angels.
- 36 - • The Chronicles of the Pharaoh’s Daughter •
*Note to reader: Fast forward six-years later, and I finally met a sibling of my father’s who is not an addict of narcotics or alcohol and has surpassed fifty-five. She also quit smoking a few years ago; a successful, and loving, author and real estate mogul named Georgia. In addition, although I still battle with cigs, I am much more trying, loving, and forgiving of myself when I falter.
- 37 - • Davina Rhine •
Genealogy and Gynecology
The melody merges with tragic memories Young girl=young heart She becomes beaten, bothered by the sins of the family which weigh on her like butter on bread But it’s the secrets of shame that she must bear Shackled and obligated, for no one to hear
The past pushes through leaving bloodstains, she must wear in her panties Letters sewn on her breast Ripped bras stashed in forensics
Bloated she sinks into the witches river, cursed and chained Hung heavy at daybreak with millstone What sin has my corrupt father, and authority now accused me? Genealogy and gynecology
Old Be, been Bent An alcoholic’s daughter, she’s a daughter of war Dreams her third eye has leave no tangible words just heavy breathing and hearts barely beating
- 38 - • The Chronicles of the Pharaoh’s Daughter •
No distinct memory, just malady Malnourished impressions digesting her soul Scars on her heart and her bones Disfigured Knifed Why has such evil been done to me? What evil did I do? What evil could I have possibly done at just five-years-old?
Female. Sexual object Take. Taken. Veil. Ssh! Trial by ordeal. Hide! You’re blamed. Hang your empty woman’s head in shame! TAG! You’re it!
Have I deserved such a hellish life of strife? The cruelty of not given back while on my back Hands to heaven to plead for mercy
God bites her hands He’s rabid Out of control, he won’t let go Ripping from her, her flesh Taking her head He swallows her in, whole Father! She screams Mother yells and throws herself in the street of children’s pleas
- 39 - • Davina Rhine •
Genealogy and gynecology
The jury is out She is alone on the stand Muted Woman. Regression a family trait Self-pity and self-destruction her siblings fate Dad a dead vet Mom in her fifties, agile . . . Running, jumping, hopping, slamming But the cage door never opens The maze complex Mental disease breeds Fighting the family lineage Where does this old woman begin and the little girl end? Sotah.
- 40 - The Possession
Date Rape and the Ashipu
• The Chronicles of the Pharaoh’s Daughter •
My Green Chair
Sitting here almost thirty sifting through what life has handed me and what I’ve done with it I’m left feeling dirty semi-exploited, in need of comfort
Life is not a coin thrown to chance I’ve concluded and reneged on my former stance. However, even chaos has organization in its center Boring vs. exciting Damn, what a choice.
My green chair remembers me Intermediate meditating with my seventeen-year-old self and her forty
Come here, sit on my lap Let your younger self meet the woman she will be For thirteen years, my green chair equaled my therapy.
So why does she sit dusty and neglected in storage?
- 45 - • Davina Rhine •
Dancing Skeletons
Dancing skeletons The last drum beats like a heart bleeding set in stone at the Aztec mountain
Ancient whispers circles around As the gods and goddesses fight it out Ear lopes stretched, neon feathers dressed Chiseled priests, market mistresses Gorgeous doms in drag
Dancing skeletons Atonement Un-selfish death if crops of corn give rise to salvation
But lost in our lust forgotten in our quest is our crusade that dominated the seas and trade enslaving the new worlds leaving the natives hoping to out-swim the piranhas
- 46 - • The Chronicles of the Pharaoh’s Daughter •
The Roller Girls
I have such a good way of hiding things Bury me under piles of work Weights, heaving on my chest
Let me work sunrise-till-sundown and all will fade in time
No rum No scotch No clothing No barriers No roller girls
Today I am who I am In a taxi trying to run towards life, “No easy way out . . .”
Hello, New York City!
- 47 - • Davina Rhine •
Let me get lost in Times Square I will blend right in with the hopefuls and have-beens Dreamers of yester-year
Med students previously, now all strung out On what life seemed to promise us Then took away Cops and corruption duke it out As Chinese food mingles with fresh pretzels Let the blades of syringes tickle my feet As I seek cream-filled lobster tails Electric squeals from peepshows and Broadway
Milk from our childhood is suddenly served warm, not sour, at the manor house, reincarnation And there are roller girls everywhere, with tattoos, pins, chipped teeth, and polished fingerwaves Eras overlapping with neon lights, steam, and the pollution of dreams and karma I think I hear Sinatra at the Paramount And someone shouts, “It’s snowing in the Tenderloin!”
I trade in my poverty and pumps and jog out to Central Park to be reborn, recast, rewinded, restarted, refilmed. I’m a star trying to get a ride to nirvana.
- 48 - • The Chronicles of the Pharaoh’s Daughter •
A Dream within a Dream: Erotica, Violence, and Fear.
—A conversation with myself about my hidden desires, conflicts, and their meanings.
Dedicated to Poe and his poem.
I have been studying dreams from a psychological and biological perspective lately. I did not intend to find arousal hidden within them. I have read the dreams of others uncensored at a dreamscape website that is used for scientific study. The dreams have alot of sexual and introspective elements. There also is a huge exposure to violence recorded within them. I have found some of them so intensely erotic that I have used them for role-playing and sexual stimuli in the bedroom. This stimuli and “borrowing” is much more subtle than S&M perhaps, but that makes the pleasure also much more surreal. It is riddled with the forbidden and unknown. Fantasy can become reality even if it’s not real or it is abstract. It provides a temporary outlet for real secret fantasies that even your partner doesn’t know of. It was only a matter of time that I would wake trembling in fear from a dream of my own. At the same time I wish I could have gotten lost in the dream and stayed there for a while . . . dreams have many theorized reasons for existence. Some say R.E.M. (Repetitive Eye Movement) dreams are the path that our subconscious uses to talk to us; to give us insight into the unseen. If we look at the clues we can figure out the puzzle. The puzzle is suppose to bring the unconscious to the conscious to help us make decisions, or face things that are troubling us deep down.
- 49 - • Davina Rhine •
They also serve a biological purpose that is necessary for survival. R.E.M. is the way the brain repairs itself by “heating up”. Dreams are so vivid and impressing it’s believed that dreams gave birth to the original gods and goddesses in mythology. Dreams were cited as visions among the ancient. This theory is very specific to Greek mythology and explanations that gods were characters in our dreams and not gods themselves can be found in ancient works by Aristotle. I have been going through a spiritual and identity transformation the past few months which has flowed over to my sexual life, as well as my dreams. Like the wild, you are always present, but always changing and evolving. The dream I had this morning is clear evidence of these influences on my psyche. I was living in a house fashioned after a Greek Doric temple that was at the bottom of the sea. The waters were the turquoise of the Aegean Seas. They were warm and thriving with life. These were the waters that Aphrodite was born from. Her beauty so profound it even eclipsed the violence of her birth and made that violence a secondary ‘nuisance’ detail. My tranquility was short lived. My sea city by name was actually Seattle. In the dream though the city above us looked like Seattle, the house in which I lived under the sea was Ancient Greek. The city was an island much like Crete. The name of the city was less symbolic as it was just a recent thought. I hung out with Shawn (an old friend of mine) who was in town last night. He now lives in Seattle and the city came up frequently in our conversations. Your dreams also will contain life’s most recent little details as well as more significant ones like deep questions about your identity or purpose. My heart sank to the bottom, black as all night, and filled with misery. I had made a horrible, horrible mistake buying this house. Right above us was a freeway. All Corben had to do was
- 50 - • The Chronicles of the Pharaoh’s Daughter • climb our hill and go up the center stairs and he would be right in the middle of fast traveling traffic. I had to make him aware of this danger and show it to him, so that curiosity of the unknown would never, never lead him down this path. It was a stormy afternoon filled with gloom. I walked with him hand-in-hand and took him up the stairs. At the top of the stairway was the middle lane, which was a narrow walkway center to both directions of traffic. I led him and we walked. I explained to him he could never come up here. The cars were why. If he were to slip or fall into the traffic it would kill him. He looked up at me with the innocent eyes of a four-year-old and asked, “Why?” Mothers always have this unrelenting fear of danger and something happening to their children. Something you can not control although you do everything in your power to keep danger at a far distance. A mother in a recent Dallas Child Magazine issue summarized this fear when she said, “Having a child is like having your heart outside your body walking around.” This fear has never subsided. Everything you do with your life, or in your life, is centered somehow on this child and how it will affect them. This range encompasses everything from job choices, who you keep as friends, marital choices, even within your sexuality lies a hidden truth; your child which is the ultimate biological destiny of sexual interaction. Regardless of the ecstasies of sex, Mother Nature finds a way to procreate in spite of us trying to keep her out. I was walking hand-in-hand with my son in the center lane of the freeway and suddenly the scene changes. I am being raped by a masked assailant in a room that is painted blood red. The room is my bedroom in a high-rise somewhere. I can see the stars watching me as I am raped. Their look is one of pure inquiry. They are simply observing what is going on without rendering any opinions or judgments. It’s as if they have never seen this
- 51 - • Davina Rhine • before and are truly puzzled. The curtains which are being blown by the wind lightly whip the walls around me. The rapist is not even hurting me. He is not brutal, he is gentle. Perhaps it could have even been a welcomed touch had he negotiated the terms better than this. What hurts though is that he is taking me without my consent. He keeps whispering of love where there is only distance and space. He doesn’t even know me yet he claims to. He says he has dreamt of me all of his life, yet only saw my face for the first time tonight. Up until tonight I was only a whisper in his dreams, but now I am real. No tears escape my face, but it is crimson with resentment. I plot my vengeance, but first I must find out who he is. I am speaking with a detective about the crime and submit to a rape kit. The rapist didn’t want to hurt me just contain me. I am assured rape hardly occurs in this area and I should feel safe. “Safety and freedom are two different things”, I retort. There is an officer who visits me several days later to go over the details of the rape. He is a familiar. I know his scent. I think he may have been the one who raped me. Several nights later my apartment is broken into and I am raped again. The voice is the same and the stars just sit back and watch again. But suddenly I am transformed. My color turns to a marble white with gray veins. The blue of my eyes pour right out and my nipples take their color . . . hardening like shields that are defending a warrior. My hair loses its red and becomes white and long. I become elongated. I am stretched like a marble silhouette on a Roman sarcophagus. The rapist again moans meaningless words of love. “You don’t make me happy,” I tell him. “You don’t even entice me or thrill me. You bore me.” His heart begins to dry and soon will be dust blowing in the wind. He will be remembered as the city that fell, betrayed by those whom he wanted to dominate and control in his twisted fantasy of love and worship.
- 52 - • The Chronicles of the Pharaoh’s Daughter •
Rapes in dreams are manifestations of truths and fears as well as regrets. For women it is often a manifestation of regret. Why didn’t I defend myself better or harder? Why did I let this person take control? Why didn’t I do this or that? What if I had made this choice vs. that choice—would it have changed the outcome? In the broadest sense rape in dreams can mean complete regret of past choices that have affected the present or altered the future. It may not have anything to do with rape per se. Specifically though, in my dream, it has to do with both; general life, as well as rape, and regaining a sense of control. However, with general life being the more dominant issue now than the former. When I was fourteen I dated a semi popular guy who was almost twenty or twenty-one . . . It took me five years to be able to articulate my sexual experience with him. Once I was able too the plotting began. Back then there was no such term as “date rape” and I wouldn’t have even been able to describe it at fourteen. Many women I know can relate to my experience. When you’re young you are very vulnerable and our culture raises us to be subjective to men and our primary purpose is to fulfill their sexuality. This is still true today, for the most part, regardless of the rhetoric otherwise. Case-in-point is media advertising: it is sex that sells; women’s sexuality primarily. Most young teenage girls feel pressured to have sex with whomever they are dating. A lot of time those first sexual encounters are highly pressured trades or sells. I promise to love and validate you as a person if you will just have sex with me. Daughters without good fathers or loving parents are particularly vulnerable at this age. At this point they just want someone to love them and are investing all their hopes on this one person who is old enough (normally) to see this weakness and use it as means of getting sexual gratification by taking advantage of the disparity.
- 53 - • Davina Rhine •
It took me five years to articulate that. In my particular situation I was “making-out” with the older guy. The rape awareness campaigns and the Take Back the Night campaigns were just taking form and date rape had not yet become a household name. He just kept pressuring me over and over to have sex with him. Of course, he did all of this using Shakespearian-poetic- type-of-verses to persuade me. He claimed my beauty was this and that and he must have me, etc. I told him no several times and why. I didn’t understand then why I even felt obligated to explain why I was saying no. But I didn’t understand then as I do now, that I was under no obligation to fulfill his sexual urges at my expense. After over an hour of this begging I finally just let him fuck me and got it over with. Technically, in a legal sense was it criminal? Not necessarily because I technically eventually consented as far as consent goes. However, it would have been considered statuary rape. Were their cultural factors at play that affected my ability to effectively say no and leave the situation? Yes. Was my age and inexperience taken advantage of? Yes. Most rapes are not stranger rapes statistically . . . it is date rape and household rape which can be very complex and varied. Was he aware of this subtle power issue and the violation? I don’t know. Men are raised in our culture to believe in a sense of entitlement to women. But even at almost twenty how mature could he himself be? Age brings wisdom and clarity. Regardless of his musings and pledges of love and awe in exchange for sex, did I see him again? No. He called me for the first time a few weeks, or a few months, later wanting to see me. He told me he had been in jail. I advised him I had moved on and met someone else. A golden opportunity presented itself when I was nineteen or so. I ran into this person downtown and the plot of revenge was born. I dated him and gave him the best sex of his life over and over again. I wanted the sex to be like a drug he had to
- 54 - • The Chronicles of the Pharaoh’s Daughter • have and could not do without. He fell in love with both the sex and me (allegedly) and wanted to get serious. We did that for a while and then I dumped him. I heard he took it pretty bad and was broken-hearted. I tipped the scales finally. Justice had been served. Did I mean to be that cold-hearted from beginning to end? Not necessarily. It was a by-product of inner rage from his former exploit of me, when I was vulnerable and too young for someone his age, he was far closer to adulthood than me. However, he was a lot of fun the second time around and I did enjoy the sex almost as much as I enjoyed the ending of it. But the thing that sucks though, he still won in the end. He had pressured me, in the second round, pre-break-up, into doing something I didn’t want to do. I am more understanding of the situation and forgiving both of myself, and him, at the age of twenty-nine. It took over fifteen-years to get from there-to-here and it was necessary that I attempted to change the power dynamics of him over me, to me over him, to eventually get here though. That is the power women lose when we are raped. Be it rhetorically in dreams or in physical reality. We also lose this power when we sacrifice so much of ourselves, our desires, our goals even, and make compromises daily to meet the needs of our commitments to others, to work, to children, and to spouses. In the broadest general sense that is the manifestation of the rapes in my dream. I am trying to figure out how to reconnect to myself and my desires without hurting myself or my family. I am soul searching. I have lost a sense of self-empowerment that has to be reclaimed in order to feel whole. There has to be a defined medium. How am I going to apply this to my current life? I don’t know. I am at a crossroad. I am being called spiritually and intellectually to the Black Sea region to contribute to the excavations of the Amazons. Time wise I don’t have to make a pressing choice; it will take another five years to ten years to
- 55 - • Davina Rhine • fulfill my academic criteria to be considered an authority. Can I go over there to assist the research teams as an amateur prior to that? Yes. However, I am telling myself I have to have my masters or whatever in this field before I can go. This enables me to put it off so it doesn’t disrupt my marriage-like partnership or my commitment to child-rearing for the time being. I have already made proposals to my spouse about us going over there, and he doesn’t want to and has implied both his fears (I will meet someone if I go without him) as well as the guilt . . . I would be choosing that over my obligations to family. I have set the stage of expectation that we, or I, will go once my degree is completed. That gives him a few years to prepare for it and hopefully accept my invite. But yet the Amazons, Trojans, Aegeans, Egyptians, and Romans call out to me daily, even in my dreams both asleep and awake. It is by far the most intriguing love affair or fantasy I have ever had. It is connecting me back with my most primitive self. I am so infatuated with Marc Antony and Cleopatra, Helen of Troy and Paris, and the Mycenaean’s . . . it leaves me longing for something more than what I have in my current relationship. This brings us to the next scene in my dream. I am back walking hand-in-hand with Corben down a dark passageway between Turkish houses in what appears to be Anatolia, but it’s supposed to be the City of Seattle. We find a doula-type breastfeeding pillow with a mummified infant being cradled in the center. The mother appears to be asleep next to the baby. She is dressed as a hippie-type with beads and dreads in her hair and has some tattoos. She is tanned from the sun and has black hair with both red and blonde highlights. She resembles a mixture of the many squatters I have encountered on my travels across the country. She serves as a cumulative representation of all young women of my genre that I have personally encountered and have had relationships or acquaintances with. I wake her up.
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I am alarmed and have to inquire about what happened to the baby. She was strung out and appeared to be a junkie. She said she didn’t want the baby and wanted to do this. I looked at her in disbelief and shock, “How did the baby die?” I asked. “I stopped feeding it,” she said. I looked at her in scorn and rage. If that’s not what you wanted you should have had an abortion. She told me she couldn’t afford one. Looking around her and at her circumstances, I judged her quickly. She apparently did not make much of an effort either way. I grabbed her by the wrist and told her I was taking her to the authorities. She will be punished for her neglect and killing of this child who died as a separate person from her body post-birth. This was not an issue of abortion rights, but post-birth murder. (Even politics and my favorite show Law & Order: SVU find their way into my dreams.) I took her to the detective and explained what happened. The mother stood accused, but said nothing in her defense. The detective went to where the mummified infant was. The doula pillow and the baby were gone. The detective advised me there was no evidence of a crime and let the mother go. I think this aspect of the dream represents, symbolically, the conflict between career, inspirations, ambitions, desires and that of family and “rooted” responsibilities. However, that conflict is not necessarily a true one. A lot of times it is imposed by our loved ones onto us (mothers/women) out of fear of the unknown. For example, doing field work in a foreign land doesn’t necessarily have to conflict with my family or home responsibilities to my partner or my child. They are only a conflict if one party doesn’t want me doing that line of work because the future in it is unmapped. If our dreams are met with resistance, it then does affect the family. It puts us in a position of having to choose one or the other. In reality we should be able to have both. This is a common dilemma whose origins lie in sexism, regardless of how well-intended our spouses may be. Our “callings” or ambitions
- 57 - • Davina Rhine • don’t have to conflict with family/marriage, they can coincide if all parties are willing. My problem right now is they are to an extent going to conflict and what can I do to resolve that conflict, so that the three are harmonious? The female mother represents my past-self just like the rape imagery did. The mother me finding her and the mummified baby represents my current self at a crossroad. Family and my loyalty to my son and spouse come before all else. This discipline is much different than desire. Desire can be kept in the mind; discipline is what is reflected in your actions, or lack thereof. Much like Eve, the apple is always more tempting until it’s been tasted and then it’s replaced by regret. If I go to the Black Sea now vs. later how will the outcomes differ? Would I have chosen to stay in the garden looking at the apple? Or would I have tasted it and thrown discretion and cautiousness to the wind to have what I want? What my soul needs to thrive? One of my favorite poems is Edgar Allan Poe’s, A Dream within a Dream. The suggestiveness and surrealism in my dream is as twisted, and as alluring as this poem, hence the comparison. Where else can you find beauty, fear, love and violence that’s so interwoven that it is both related and poetic? In Poe’s poem he is observing the beauty and power of monstrosity even as it closes in on him and he is strangely attracted to it. Though he should fear the demonic and flee, he is attracted to it and submits. My dream is still leading me down a path that I am inclined to follow, to see where it goes regardless of the danger or risk involved. I must know the truth and see this through to the end. I am now talking to the detective again about my rape cases. I expressed my concern to her that I think the rapist may be the Officer Sanders who keeps checking in on me and contacting me. She thinks the idea is ludicrous. I decide to take matters into my own hands. I know what he really wants from me and I will give it to him in exchange for a
- 58 - • The Chronicles of the Pharaoh’s Daughter •
DNA sample that I can compare forensically to the DNA in the rape kit. The rapist spared no expense in obtaining his pleasure including self incrimination. I call him and suddenly hearing his voice which is soft and serene makes me want to trust him and to feel his strong arms engulf me. I tell him I am scared and want him to come over. He says he would love to spend the night with me and take care of me, to make me feel safe and secure. I suddenly swell with desire and want his embrace. I feel faint and flushed. I remind myself why I am doing this which is to regain control and find out if he is my attacker and remind myself of the crime. When he arrives he is still in uniform and his muscles and physique is emphasized by his taunt clothes. He immediately comes to my side and holds me and lightly whispers promises of protection and love into my ear. The voice is strikingly familiar. But instead of fear or anger I am filled with lust and yearning to have him inside of me. I take him to the red room and open the curtains so the stars can watch again. We explore each other like travelers of the ancient world seeking out everything new, exotic, foreign and unknown. Like the rapist he doesn’t want to use protection because he wants to feel all of me, with nothing standing between us. In the far distance I hear my own voice reminding me, enjoy it now but don’t forget to get your evidence afterwards so that you can do what must be done regardless. I climb on top of him and start to ride him. I wake up. I wake trembling in fear, confusion and arousal. I try to go back to sleep so the dream can finish and I can both get off and find out if he was my attacker. The dream was so surreal I could have sworn to smell Officer Sanders in my bed. I laid there for a while but sleep (and R.E.M with it) had already left, leaving me alone to figure it all out. Is it at the end trying to say that my lover is my enemy—or that I am?
- 59 - • Davina Rhine •
What Happened to the High Rise?
Light casting off god’s sky Crawling towards the shadows Hidden, tucked in the corner of high-rises and thighs Hearts burst like balloons getting too close to the sun
Anger flowing out like a storm slapping the wives faces Anger displaced Mismanaged Misplaced Abused Neglected
The workers red flag escapes to the stars Love flying away from exploit Leaving smeared stains of cruelty and heartbreak Universal
Laundry stretching out from every window Every orifice screams, bleeds Don’t fade away from me Don’t become a ghost who can’t see me Refusing any of me, rejects all of me Personal
- 60 - • The Chronicles of the Pharaoh’s Daughter •
The sunlight carrying the stench away from stained laundry under the Chinese high-rise Memories are but scents, chilling the spine in black and white now framed, frozen, and still
Single shot One pose Stiff
Sweatshops working overtime for cell phone factories Indentured drive-bys Wives are tossed and turned like the machines at work Reheated pancakes for Peking duck Women who are no longer green Pungent
Burned to the bottom of the social order Like blackened shark on a spoon, with crushed garlic and tofu being eaten for dinner on a roof-top patio
Ghostly tied to a tablet I break the bonds that bind and sneak from the 13th floor to follow the Yangtze River.
What happened to the high-rise? She grew heels and walked away.
- 61 - • Davina Rhine •
Self-Centered Selfish
Self-centered selfish Standing tall in fishnets Canonized, corrected Hooking a look of disdain Going on like I wasn’t gone
Life is like nylon, stretched to death Ripped and ragged red hair, red eyes
Self-centered selfish Standing tall in fishnets.
- 62 - • The Chronicles of the Pharaoh’s Daughter •
The Animal Instinct
It’s been ten years, almost, since I have been a vegetarian, but occasionally I smell unique meats that don’t repulse me, but entice me . . . like Black Forest Ham, or pastrami. It’s a matter of discipline vs. desire. Sometimes I will linger over a bowl of warmed pastrami inhaling it in an animalistic way, but the urge never defeats the reason. When I was eighteen, I preferred my steaks bloody, pounded and soaked in brandy, or bourbon, with crushed peppercorn and garlic. But I also liked teasing and dominating/destroying, and hating god, for whatever that’s worth. Reason or logic is both the advance and hindrance of humanity. We know, plausibly, that our brain size increased, therefore developing from primal to modern, due to consuming meat or rather initially bone marrow. I don’t eat meat morally and spiritually for a number of reasons, namely corporate farming, cruelty, and wastefulness. Organic farming isn’t suitable to me either. If you can’t look the animal in the eyes before you kill it and “consume” it, then it’s spiritually and environmentally out-of-balance. I know killing sounds primal, but “we” do it every day . . . “consuming” what we don’t kill, and killing the (our) desires/needs in the name of civilization. Everyone (mostly) does this but with radically different definitions of right and wrong, animalistic justifications for their sins, etc, based on color, gender, class, and privilege. And privilege determines the punishment, which in theory the fear of punishment is supposed to contain our violent urges (eating meat is a violent urge that involves killing). This constraint, in theory, should work in a civilized society but exploitation and
- 63 - • Davina Rhine • privilege both undermine it. That’s why a rich white male could get off with a handshake for rape but a poor black man is more likely to be executed. (Quite literally—according to the ACLU report The Case Against the Death Penalty, between 1930 and 1976, 455 men were executed for rape, and of those executed after being found guilty of rape, 90% were African American. The same report also concludes that women, of varying racial backgrounds, were more likely to be executed than not, if they killed their male abuser.) The Native Americans had a much more proper, or civilized, society in regards to animals and human interaction. Of course there were tribes with slaves, so nothing is perfect or ideal, and some tribes isolated women, while in others they held political and spiritual clout. That of course is just one example of irony, and one of sexism. But in theory and practice both their way of life seemed far more civilized than our current ‘democratic’ Republic . . . And if animals had a better life now, as they did then in a natural state, I might just eat pastrami occasionally. For years I have been debating the hindrances of the nuclear family structure vs., communal tribal type of family structures, and more precisely the matriarchic type of environments, and it becomes more self-evident to me communal tribal family structures wins; wins for women, children, men, animals, people, and people of all ethnic backgrounds. Perhaps the basis of my conclusion (which is this) is solid: Children, animals, and adults alike always desire, need community connections, and on multiple, not necessarily linear, lines. But the origins of sexism, is linear. So are the origins of the most historically recent case of universal racism, which initiated with colonization (although we, humanity, have been working hard at reversing this). And we repeat the same pattern of failure, when we want to branch out but are constricted to stay on a certain path . . . and questioning that path becomes a huge dilemma that impacts everyone within the small family structure, because it is few vs.
- 64 - • The Chronicles of the Pharaoh’s Daughter • many, and shakes it. If it was a tribal environment the human support and environmental structure would be more in line with our needs, as well as that of the community, and thus rape, murder, and mass enslavement of animals and their slaughter would be taboo. And when we wanted Pastrami we could just walk away without hurting anyone, animal instinct or not. When it comes to animal instinct we still need a pack of many, so when the world rocks, it has more to absorb than a few, weakening the quakes of the impact, while still providing the nurturance and care the “family” needs, or the group in a broader sense, which is the opposite of the nuclear structure . . . which puts the weight of the world on a shoulder of the few. This lack of support has also been noted as a contributing factor in violent, non pre-mediated violent crimes. I still don’t eat pastrami, but I question where our world is going, since there are so many of us living amongst the few . . . fighting nature in order to be ordained as “civilized” with little help and few cheerleaders. And sometimes with nothing but the animal instinct to keep us company.
- 65 -
The Sinners
Sex, Science, and Aging Budgets
• The Chronicles of the Pharaoh’s Daughter •
Where Does Green Leave Us?
Where does green leave us? Yearning for more
In sad candle-lit rooms stuck in the past
My black dress whips around me As I grow ten-feet-tall The hints of rumors cling to my skirt
I fling out the apples dying in thirst
May the windowsill they land on be more freeing than where I have been.
- 71 - • Davina Rhine •
Hell’s Kitchen . . .
All of this anger boiling for years has finally found its way through
There’s no stopping the mess Its finally boiled over The pasta is overcooked And I don’t care The fishnets have runs in ’em And I don’t care The bills aren’t paid And I don’t care I don’t care
I am being immature irresponsible And I don’t care
The vegetables can rot The onions can wither The garlic fray The bananas brown
I will no longer deny my anger or my love, for my heart is my own
My own boiling cage of hot water and macaroni Screw the bell peppers and dirty diapers
- 72 - • The Chronicles of the Pharaoh’s Daughter •
I am a woman scorned not by love, but by its indifference Fuck the mangos they can all go to hell
I am finally whole and free in my own kitchen And no one is taking my fishnets back from me My basil will grow wild and free I will strum my own bass, to my own tunes It shouldn’t make any difference to you
It’s my heart And I have taken it back, as I knew I should
The vegetables can rot in the fridge The meat, I don’t eat, can go sour
The heat was turned off years ago Is this anger? Is this resentment? It was—it is.
It is now fierce resolution I am no longer the rebellious wife Always fighting and clawing my way out to survive And breathe from beneath you
I am my own master My own whore My own kitchen
I am me, accept me, or reject me I don’t fucking care.
- 73 - • Davina Rhine •
The Forbidden Lovers Door . . . An Intimate Civil War.
Can love flourish with no touch or embrace? Is it a dream one yearns for, but may not strive to have? So profound the lovers dream with no touch to be had, no bed to be found in
Its existence is a secret in the heart and mind You turn your cheek to love, for love knows no honor, but honor knows its duty
When a king whispers your name in his sleep When a playwright stumbles drunk, ranting of your denied love The actress will perform well and turn her cheek to love Love forbidden for it shall not be, except an unfulfilled hoped for memory
Words are stirred when love is prolonged The absence of touch does not tame it but ignites it Once love is handled by hands its magic withers Once the seed is spread the wind carries it away . . .
Once love strays from dreaming It fades and falls Like a flower dried by the sun, ignored by the rain, bitter and torn by the pain
- 74 - • The Chronicles of the Pharaoh’s Daughter •
One can dream of the touch, the fiery embrace To be endured only to wake and find grief in its place
If love does not refrain from touch, mystery kiss and wine All would be begotten
That shall not be Cannot be Will not be
Love cannot be engaged, where there is but a raging sea lying underneath A god would curse the lovers fallen from grace
For civil and cordial would-be lovers, for honor and decency, One must simply refrain and have faith Only be content with love in the imagination For woe is your destiny if your loves come to be
Where one wants to be sweet they must be reserved
The fruit is already owned by another, who has his hands all over the tree Bitter sweet is the garden of the King of Kings, where all must accept their fate
Lovers who dream can be content, to save their passions and souls for another lifetime to be
- 75 - • Davina Rhine •
Passion is brief and exhaustible Fleeting to be forgotten
It is better that imagination from afar, keep the souls love alive for eternity Rather than touch kill it, instantly for insanity The forbidden lover’s door, turmoil to be endured if thy love is not denied An intimate civil war
A love fulfilled could cost a crown, a country, a home This love and lust however profound must pass in the night Like a play on the stage of the theatre Or it will end in an English Gallows Pole Twisted, mangled, muted, and corrupt
Shame not love Civil and honorable lovers Shame is not our pleasure
A rogue and a liar, we would be if the Garden of Eden did not foresee . . .
- 76 - • The Chronicles of the Pharaoh’s Daughter •
For Troy, My Heart Sails . . .
For Troy, my heart sails . . . The Goddess of time standing still at my feet, demanding an answer No more time to run and hide Goddess child your time has come Make a choice or die
She stands behind me, before me Ageless and wise Profane and obscene How could I be such a fool? To deny her my love this long, after such a sweet first embrace?
Burning me with her very own face which is mine . . . I have been following orders which were my own All along thinking they were hers Oh mad lady let me go . . . The crone instead opens her hand, and welcomes me yet again “Daughter of Lesbos, you are back home!”
- 77 - • Davina Rhine •
The madmen on the turquoise sea have ravaged me Left me hollow and empty A skeleton dancing alone My skeleton is burning, drenched in secret perfume Playing make-believe in the graveyard of what used to be
Stealing my own dreams, from me in my sleep Swallowing my breath when I wake The Mycenaean King intent on rage and turmoil still pursues me But I have fled No longer leading a life that was not meant to be For Troy, my heart sails . . .
My own labyrinth I found myself lost in Deceived by my own darkness This gave birth to me all over again The light has finally shown itself true It has found its way through The maze is no longer just me and you For Troy, my heart sails . . .
Like Helen, I chose my own path . . . So why does it burn my feet with regret? Unlike Helen, I do not leave for love, except that of oneself . . . Like Helen, I do leave to find myself again Unlike Helen, this journey needs no hero, or a lovers devoted army I don’t intend for my journey to end
- 78 - • The Chronicles of the Pharaoh’s Daughter •
Unlike Helen, Destiny, I must face alone . . . strong and secure. Unlike Helen, there is something I place above me, more sacred than love, more profound than hate. It is Fate.
For Troy, my heart sails . . .
- 79 - • Davina Rhine •
The Chains of Cleopatra and the Snakes of Separation
The Chains of Cleopatra surround me Her snakes bind me Their poison setting me free To live one must die again and again and first over and over
What face I will wear tomorrow I don’t know but it will be different than the one I wear today
The snakes of separation kiss me, blind me, and tease me And kill me as I finally submit to their sacred bite The embrace of Cleopatra herself Did she marry for love or for war? One isn’t so sure anymore . . .
I submit to their fatal embrace I will not fight fate anymore I submit to God’s will Through her I shall be restored
Their pungent and poignant smell lingers Their promise leads me to more Even as death passes by my door
- 80 - • The Chronicles of the Pharaoh’s Daughter •
Coiling around my heart they crawl Crossing me ‘for crossing myself’, for far too long
Their poison leaves me longing for more . . . Cleopatra’s chains and my own shame, bind me to this library Love and fire can’t tear me away from her womb of knowledge and folklore I no longer deny the snakes that bind me They are the earths promise Making me face reality
Their decay hits me as a passerby in midday Do not hate me or fear me my young Marc Antony, for Caesar is dead
My date with destiny is to be my own to make I am love and I am pain There’s not much in-between expect for my reign However, do not love me yet you will not ever forget me You think you need me, you do not. I am corrupt, do not follow me, for am I flawed and lead great men to their graves . . .
Do not cherish me for I will fall . . . Do not worship me for I am just a woman, living in Cleopatra’s wake and her chains.
- 81 - • Davina Rhine •
The Girl in Blue Jeans Clinging to a Cross . . .
The girl in blue jeans clinging to a cross . . . Not just any cross, but a fallen, broken one Nailed down I am I walk this way and that way My blue jeans snug and falling low As my hands reach out My blue jeans crawl closer to my ass I reach out for the cross, God, can’t I take it all back?
Instead of an answer, he gives me holy water and a hot war
Forgive me for wearing a white t-shirt with a black bra with a little ribbon and lace here-and-there But I am a woman with a heart beating, thumping, pounding, and strumming In a cold, cold, cold world made of men I am just flesh burning
I am just a girl in blue jeans reaching for a cross . . .
- 82 - • The Chronicles of the Pharaoh’s Daughter •
Crucify me god, you are all that I have left Damn me as well, as all men before
Crucify me god, I am after all no better than you
Not thinking clearly . . . I have sinned in my heart And my head aint no good Not thinking clearly, I try to do as you
Crucify me god, For being just like you
My blue jeans fall, my belt buckle loose
I stand naked before you, ready to be judged Let thee who has not sinned cast the first stone
If you want to whip me o’ god I will accept your mercy What is that you say? I should climb up on top of the cross and lay by you? The way you and Mary Magdalene used to do A scholar and a saint but your love was true
- 83 - • Davina Rhine •
Wicked love seeded in sin can not be true Especially, if the omegas anger is induced I am just a girl in blue jeans looking for a cross God we are both fools thinking anyone could believe we could do no wrong? Feel no wrong? Think no wrong? Including ourselves? We are only human, but who knew?
You were just a boy carrying a cross, and I am just a girl in blue jeans looking for you.
- 84 - • The Chronicles of the Pharaoh’s Daughter •
The Magnolia Trees at Midnight
What makes you think you can, dance with me till midnight under the magnolia trees?
Leaving me a princess only with a stinking pumpkin
I take my glass heel and spite you with it May the shards of glass crash your looking ball as you gaze into the past
My dress is torn and ripped I stand naked with only safety pins as my friend My eyeliner runs, as my fishnets rip My boots leave an imprint as I take a stand at midnight under the magnolia trees.
- 85 - • Davina Rhine •
Not Once, Not Ever
Never will you know . . .
How I walk How I smile How I laugh How I stride How I caress How I ride
Not once, not ever
Spite strikes me smitten with ambition Like a cat curling at her milk She sniffs, but refusing to sip
Not once, not ever Never will you know
What makes my heart ripen or my cheeks flush Like secrets in a cage all tied up
The door is locked The key is lost
Not once—but never.
- 86 - • The Chronicles of the Pharaoh’s Daughter •
The Church
As the pink flowers blow by, I tremble and cry I wonder what went wrong between you and I When did we stop hearing our song, “Walk the Line?” Lost, both betrayed in the garden all along, dazed By this lover’s quarrel and maze The labyrinth of the lost We are no Henry and June, heh?
I see the tree and know where the snake has been The apple reminds me of you I’ve been bitten too . . .
We are all descendents of, born from sin So I can understand and forgive The lust Satan gave you Dreamt of kisses, flirtatious minds
But did you cross the line? I said what I had to say then I stopped where I stood and gave the devil back his goods.
How could you give away my heart with your body too? She swallowed your semen,
- 87 - • Davina Rhine • as you fell face first into her blazing bush Burning me and burning us No compassion, no consideration Demons work
We ain’t June and Johnny But just Adam & Eve Plottin’ and lyin’ Abel and Cain We are, slayin’ one another Given eachother up to the highest bidder Lost with the fall, the whole world sees Your empty arms full of someone else, Cold indifference It all makes sense now You weren’t staring at me, but her
The secret parties at other peoples houses Meetings at after-work bars Everyone knew but me
The sin you both shared now explains why it took over a month of you without me to confess love, bound to me for eternity I’m your rock, but she’s your church.
We ain’t June and Johnny after all But two sad miserable fools caught after the fall too blind we can’t see the line.
- 88 - • The Chronicles of the Pharaoh’s Daughter •
The Pearl Affair
I’ve seen her necklace too I’ve even tried it on, but it quickly burned my skin Made me sick so I gave it back I didn’t want the pearl affair so how could you?
- 89 - • Davina Rhine •
Ball and Chain
It’s your turn to cry and fade away in the sea of shame that you slept in, and sworn I had been
Wave of rage awaken me Left shaken by a hurricane that tore our house down
As I stood by you, I didn’t know that she had tried to fill my place
Look at the tears messin’ up the pages I’m writing on. Look at what you have done to your best friend.
- 90 - • The Chronicles of the Pharaoh’s Daughter •
You Know
You know you now own all my old wounds Re-torn Ragged Ripped open
You Know you now own all my old songs about my dad They are now yours I never trusted him But I trusted you
I never counted on him And I wish I never counted on you You know if you hadn’t been my son’s father I wouldn’t have been such a damn fool
You know you now own all my sadness, my anger My midnight terrors My morning vomits My mid-day collapses
- 91 - • Davina Rhine •
You know you now own all my grief old and new You know you now own all my pain
You know, Yes, you know What you’ve done And with who
- 92 - • The Chronicles of the Pharaoh’s Daughter •
The Garden of the Gods
I live in the shadow of love’s death I have run to the mountains to bury myself from you—from us— I hang dangerously on the verge clinging close to the cliff My body sways The ragged razor edges cut me I’m pushed hard by the devil’s wind His laughter was the noose in the garden that hung me by my bleeding heart
I suffocate in this betrayed lovers abyss My broken heart peril My side is exposed at the top of the hill Demonic mountain goats and titanic sea crabs, the size of Jupiter, pick at my engorged life Each muscle, each intestine, they devour some of me Tossing it, turning it, eating it I am such a foolish bride Baby milk spilling Tipping the oceans over Beasts sucking on my breast I drank my cup tainted red of lovers poisoned wine
- 93 - • Davina Rhine •
In the shadow of love’s death, the gods laughter fills the dying garden Our love—a shallow mockery—a disgrace Hera is pleased, her plan to cage me worked My home she polluted with the dung of ancient animals Beetles scurrying across the floor The roof she covered with oily black crows sleek and consumed with rot all because I am not like her husband, or her, cruel and cold, trickery, and polyamory
They dance around my barren home popping their oversized heads and egos through windows and doors taunting, foolish bride! The Garden of the Gods disowns you! The Garden of Death awaits you!
Like Medusa, I am stricken and cursed Aphrodite has denied me My lover forsaken me Leaving me burning in the contemptuous bush
Fallen love like fallen angels cuts and sears No savior to pray to, or pray for No hope to kneel before No healing waters to bath in No oracle to tell your sins, just the hell they have been left in
- 94 - • The Chronicles of the Pharaoh’s Daughter •
The gods mockery in the garden, reminds me what we thought was love, was destiny, was fate was just a display of their wicked cruelty Our broken lives, twisted, consumed, on display for their amusement
They have cast aside this fallen love, bored in the shadow of death, for us to dwell in
No trust, just wounded hearts plump for the harvesters picking No honesty, just loves greatest disguise Our demise Our love can not be reincarnated Our loves sins to bold to be forgiven
The master chides me one-more-time with the philosopher’s stone, death to the foolish bride!
- 95 -
The Capricorns and the Cancers
Burn the House Down If You Must
• The Chronicles of the Pharaoh’s Daughter •
I Don’t
I don’t cook I don’t clean I don’t love I don’t feel Just stuck somewhere numb Between heaven and hell Lost on a clearance rack Forgotten and for sale
I don’t read I don’t bathe I don’t heal I don’t feel I don’t listen to music I don’t play I don’t smile I don’t even scream anymore I open my mouth and the pain is so heavy, it can’t even find its way out Not even when our son is putting himself in danger Or running amuck
I don’t sleep I don’t eat I don’t work
- 101 - • Davina Rhine •
I don’t mother I don’t bother I’m not a lover, wife, or friend Just your used-up has been You exhausted the best years of my life And like many men, did me wrong, after you sucked me dry
I’m no one after you
Instead of I do’s It’s just a bunch of I don’ts All I do is wait for you to call Swimming in debt, trying to get closer to you Bankruptcy bringing me closer to death My shelf life has already been spent on you Like my credit cards, I’m expired and overdrawn
- 102 - • The Chronicles of the Pharaoh’s Daughter •
Cinderella and her Pumpkin Man
It’s been March 17th for a long, long time As I wait my turn in my red dress Watching the clock watch me
We both are standing still A face-off Match-down A televised caged event Cinderella and her pumpkin man My loser’s ball gown
No change in time as I wait for you When is it going to be March 18th? The day after I lost you?
- 103 - • Davina Rhine •
The Backyard Amazon
Caterpillars are in the closet Maybe we will have butterflies by the end of June, or before the next full moon?
The ants have taken a rest gone to bed early sleepy from a hard day in the sun
A witches milk and honey
I’m replacing the commercially cut down rainforests, with my new backyard Amazon grass.
The dog winkles as he tinkles Our backyard is filled with sticks and stones, for the dog to chew and our little Paleontologist to dig through
Our son is tall with an orange shirt on Hands on hip, he contemplates where to spit
- 104 - • The Chronicles of the Pharaoh’s Daughter •
I am sipping my iced tea, loving the rainforest that has grown up around me All it takes, is too much work With a husband away, a kid to raise, a family to feed, and a job to do leaving me no time to pull weeds, mow the yard and rake the leaves Giving nature a chance to be nature Yellow and gold mix with the green
The world has my full attention and affection as I watch, the ivy letting her long hair down.
- 105 - • Davina Rhine •
Innocence
Innocence in the hope of madness Yes my love, be reborn Give Try Give back to me Embers of passion Life Breathe Deep Take into me From me Be with me
Like waves rocking on the big free sea Swim to me Drown in me Merge Rise Fall Crash Flow Tranquil After the storm Build Dig Deep
- 106 - • The Chronicles of the Pharaoh’s Daughter •
All hearts, our hearts, have become childlike again Serene Lovers Tasting fruit Sweet and Sour Yearning Needing Touching Teasing Playing Loving Pleasing
Innocence is the hope of love when fallen From the graces of memory Rotten from work Daily Gravity Weighing Down Sluggish
Love in the midst of sanity Lost Wear and tear Here Near There Everywhere Tune-up
- 107 - • Davina Rhine •
Scream Kiss Make-up Dish-out Break Shatter Glue-back Tender Stack Close Open Polish
Love in the midst of insanity Found Building Keep trying something new Burn the house down if you need to Start over
Rebuild the city Starting with Troy Then Ilium
Our love Rekindled Secure Burning Bright Our Future
- 108 - • The Chronicles of the Pharaoh’s Daughter •
Golden Smoldering Intense Fire Cracker Pop Damn Bang Hot Sizzle Burn
Love You Me Us Growth Redemption Starvation Salvation
Innocent Guilty Remorse Regret Let-downs Put-downs Hopes Futures Prayers Dreams
- 109 - • Davina Rhine •
Lovers Love Wept Kept
I keep you close Hold me
Innocence renewed in the strength of love We already built temples to lay and leave the past to. Free Fly Love Home To Us.
- 110 - • The Chronicles of the Pharaoh’s Daughter •
What happened to the Cancers? Finding the Aristocrat in me.
It’s nine in the morning on 01-27-07 and I am utterly perturbed and bored by this quiet moment . . . Everyone in the house is preoccupied with sleep, or video games. I am left wondering about my thirteen-year-old poet-self . . . how different we are now, and yet our desires so alike . . . I still sing and feel Sinead in the same complex way I did as teenager, but from the comforts of my car or kitchen, not walking along the train tracks in the fog or mist with my walkman stereo/headset as I did as a kid/ teen-woman-being-thing. There was no Devil Doll back then. Devil Doll’s music is good for love’s vengeance and death, but Sinead calls for its resurrection. The wind always wrestled the black hair from my ponytail early in the morning; eventually I would untie it and let the wind have the entire damned thing. Although, I admit I did like it . . . black hair powerfully being lifted up, framing your face in discord and chaos, as you sing the proverbial Sinead song, it can make a girl feel like a god, or a Queen like Akasha. Powerful. Seductive. Strong. A force. It was for the singing that my lips were painted red that early in the morning. Eventually, I cheated the wind by shaving my head as my daily passions and outbursts became more cynical with anger and age. Seventeen years later I sit hearing the train go by early in the morning leaving me both nostalgic and nauseous. But I can’t play Sinead loud and sing as if I was the only person in the world. I can’t just walk out with my headset on, absorbed in myself and my emotions/fantasies. I can only let her whisper as I hum and spin, because of the preoccupied sleepers and
- 111 - • Davina Rhine • video game players in the other room, less than six-feet away. I gradually turn up the volume and light the incense letting it infuse their nostrils and dreams. I am sneaking in some passion and suspense to my very practical life on a Saturday morning. I am left wondering, what happened to the Cancers? And the proverbial promise of paradise? My transmission went out again this past Wednesday night. Not even a warning of trouble. Suddenly, the car wouldn’t go uphill on the exit ramp for Skillman and 635. I had to turn it off with the hazards on, let it rest for ten minutes, and then try again. She would make it a block, and then smoke would fill up the right side of the sky. The same smoke, I imagine, that filled the Earth when the meteorite rocked the end of the Cretaceous. The transmission growled like a woman writhing in birth. She kept trying and trying and pushing and pushing, and nothing was happening. Corben was screaming in the background, “Were going to die!” I kept reassuring him we were fine—we just had to stay clam and try to get the car off the road for everyone’s safety. We finally got over the hill, and my black car flew . . . the engine still going, the transmission taking a break. We were able to get to Northwest Highway and Easton, surviving five and six p.m. traffic with a terrified kid, and a quitting car spitting and smoking like a medieval European fire-breathing dragon. We finally found safety at the Avia Cremation Funeral Home. Ironic, I know. My dying car kept threatening to roll out into the street when the transmission didn’t want to change gears and push us forward into the parking lot. But God was with me and guided us to safety. I could hear the angels singing, and the feet stompin’, “Another devilish woman saved today!” as musical notes from saxophones lit-up the night sky. I had a feeling that all the saints and sinners up above would retire for a nice BBQ, some southern greens, and hot-spiced lemon beer, after the singing and celebrating ended.
- 112 - • The Chronicles of the Pharaoh’s Daughter •
The staff at the funeral home was so caring and polite. They let me hang out there and even tolerated my screaming, touching, climbing, five-year-old monkey. As I called the tow truck I had to keep threatening to replace everything he loved (pizza, video games, toys, movies) with a mother’s wrath if he didn’t get his hands of those urns, and sorrow/remembrance necklaces. I felt like a woman out-of-control, teetering on the edge of insanity, as I saw my son reaching up for the ornate Japanese urns adorning the top shelves. Every attempt he made, I felt a rush of anger and frustration. Every attempt he made, I saw another comical vision of him trying to balance them on his head . . . and I am standing there hoping, praying, that this human expedition and quest for survival wouldn’t cost me several hundred dollars—several hundred dollars that I didn’t have. That would be a shitty way of not repaying their kindness. Eventually Jason and the tow truck showed up (My saviors! This time I heard trumpets from the sky!), and I could finally assign the task of steering our son in the right direction to somebody else. For five minutes I could think clearly, not grit my teeth in frustration, and think of, and mourn my loss. This black car, which has been by my side for five years, has been dependent, gallant, and as brave as a knight’s horse. The car has shared so many private moments with me. In fact, it has been my confessional booth on the way to work and home as I sung my heart out and words rolled from my tongue like foreign languages. It has been my lover that I have shared my angers and frustrations with. It has been my own private ordained priest, helping me carry my own weight. It has been my anti-St. Christopher. Tears filled my eyes as I realized it was over. The car has passed. There is no more replacing the heart, or lung, or kidney again . . . I felt grief fill me. I have had many cars over the years, like lovers, but I never even named this one. You can’t love someone you don’t have a name for. You can’t lose someone who doesn’t exist. You
- 113 - • Davina Rhine • can’t grow attached to an it, a non-person, a non-named thing, or a non-named experience. To acknowledge love, or experience it, or to hold on to it, you have to call-it-out. You have to define it and you have to name it. It has to have a name, or it doesn’t exist. But emotion is primitive, and I felt it smoldering like an inferno within me . . . hurting, digging, and cutting. I loved this little fucking car, and all the shit it took from my son, and all the emotional shits I took while in it. But it had to die, with no hope of living again, before I could feel it, articulate it. I am trying to understand why sometimes I feel torn between the worlds of my current life and my destiny: domestic everyday life and a life of adventure, suspense, intrigue and the p-word, Passion. We all confuse drama with passion, and a confessional poet’s nature is not above being mad and ludicrous. We need these little performances and sagas to give us something profound to write about it, something disturbing to taste, something luxurious, and silken, to explore while looking for the rugged edges. Obviously, washing dirty dishes daily is not the stuff that inspired Shakespeare, or his muses. In fact, dishes and housework (subservient marriage) drove both Sexton and Plath to their suicides. And well, I am not that type—completely. When I was a kid and a developing dancer and poet, I knew there was a promised island that all the Capricorns and Cancers went to, it was called Paris. I got a glimpse of it here and there while doing Madonna and Cyndi Lauper covers and dances at the blues-catfish-joint nearby. I was seven-years-old making tip-hat money from the older blues crowd in my Oak Cliff neighborhood. That was my first taste of real passion, excitement, of living. Prior to that though, I was already clearly inspired. At five, I was writing songs and poems. At six, I was leading the parking-lot funeral processions for the fallen sky-birds and back-alley cats. By nine, I was finishing books. By
- 114 - • The Chronicles of the Pharaoh’s Daughter • twelve, I was a daredevil and a fallen Baptist stealing kisses from preadolescent boys. By thirteen, I knew I was meant to see the world and all of its hidden corridors and chambers, its ghosts and mummies, its queens and rulers, its mysteries. And I was meant to show everyone this world through imagery and lyrics of poetry. To have forbidden affairs under ancient ruins, to meet the goddesses face-to-face from history, to fight alongside the Amazons of Troy, to recite poetry in Egyptian cafes, to hang out in Paris with explicit and censored artists and poets. To have my heart re-birthed again and again. Then fourteen happened, ugh, and many shameful regrets. But fast-forward to now. So how did a later teenage traveling poet end-up sealing her fate in a dirty, corrupt, smoky, corporate Texas town? By having a baby—that’s how, ha-ha! I have a vision and a zest for life that I knew a child could get so much from. I had a lot to offer a kid. So for now I am staying rounded in my family roots and the gospel of such, as I dream of both Cairo and Greece. I have my record player, and my upright bass to keep me dreaming as I reach out to my little man to give him a mommas hand. I will gradually blur the two lives, melt them together as he evolves . . . just like humanity from ape . . . to cave-person, to primitive human, to modern human . . . someday he won’t need me, or all of me, rather. For now, making the two mix is sometimes rocky, confusing, and frustrating, and at other times it strangely quiet. But someday, I will be joining the Cancers and Capricorns in living the traveling life of poetry in the tropics of censored art and banned literature. For now, I will just have to limit myself to the occasional trip.
- 115 - • Davina Rhine •
Repentance
The days of summer are long gone, so are you and I Separated by states and crime, both big and small Youthful indifference We all end up living a long time Forever is a second when you’re seventeen but becomes painful months when you’re thirty And just now doin’ your time You took your family down with you We didn’t exist then and neither did you
Someday the wind will blow you back in Bringing daddy back home from Tennessee The days of summer are long gone And soon I’ll be poor and fifty.
- 116 - • The Chronicles of the Pharaoh’s Daughter •
Crayons Spilling on the Floor
My hands tremble, my heart hurts As crayons, mixed emotions, and confusion stain the floor I have bloodshot eyes, scrapped-up knees I am so sorry young one that I am not as strong as I believed I didn’t want to fail like he did I try but I am fallen like the virgin on the cross Impaled
Will we make it tomorrow? I thought we would But now I have my doubts as I barely cling to life falling under confusions spell and tears rage through I should care but my discipline and worth are faltering
Can I even be what I need to be? I guess my boss will let me know
- 117 - • Davina Rhine •
I don’t care anymore about being anyone’s salvation or prayer because who prays for me? Self-pity
My hands tremble, my heart hurts as crayons, mixed emotions, and confusion stain the floor Just loneliness and tears, and misery
It’s the darkest night I have had in a long time so dark I can’t even be a mother who falters though I try Maybe I should give up on it all
I am tired and weak it all seems pointless and bleak I can’t keep going so why even bother?
I was let down when I was five too I am so sorry I did this to you I tried not too . . . But what can I do? But pray for you, as I turn into a runaway train bitter and blue.
- 118 - • The Chronicles of the Pharaoh’s Daughter •
Aves Love
The birds open their mouths tasting each morning No matter what night brings, they rise and sing
They work and play Feed their young Sit on them Warm them Feather them
Migrating from God’s parishes, to the island of love Bringing family back home with them
They dance, mate, live a different way A different beat on their own drum To the human eye so small But to the human heart Not small at all
Aves Love Come near me Fill me, dance with me Carry my heavy wings.
- 119 -
The Lovers
Starvation and Salvation
• The Chronicles of the Pharaoh’s Daughter •
Fated Muse
Fate is my lover’s destiny beside me Curling his toes in my bed Threading my ruby-hued hair through his fingers Kissing me, touching me Lost in my blue-silver-eyes He’s hard. I’m ready.
Fate is my lover’s destiny standing besides me Shoulder-to-shoulder, lost in pulsating enchantment Blinded by desire, aching, twisting, turning and thrashing Just a glimpse of our fire We know the world and like Cleo and Marc we want it
Fate is my lover’s destiny lying beside me We map it all over our bodies Every taste a newfound city Every inch a road leading to ecstasy Every country border an orgasm A Big-O
- 125 - • Davina Rhine •
Fate is my lover’s destiny filling me, milking me Skene’s Crème For my Spanish Renaissance My Latina master My Mexican lord and my husband-lover Bedroom revolution My fated muse explodes ‘a little death’ for my Galen g-spot
Sensual expeditions Exploring muscled backs, soft shoulders, erect towers Pearled nipples glistening like honey and gold Drunk in the Garden of Nectar Eternal thrills, ancient mysteries Peaks and valleys Mountain tops
My fated muse Inspires me, lifts me, takes me up to the hearth of heaven I climb on top, take him in He holds and molds my breasts like a lover tree full of olives Through the Hot Gates we thunder, roar and come My muse and me
- 126 - • The Chronicles of the Pharaoh’s Daughter •
The Yellow Gold
The yellow gold spinning in the Chac bowl Kneading the dough with our fingers Our hearts we make and save
Leave the sacrifices at the pool A place to rest in the sun, grieve at the grave We walk away with warm flowers and yellow gold buckets of deep well water Leaving dancing wooden spoons and bones
Bringing back life from death We feed our love, our yellow gold Our Chac bowl rising from from the sacred cenote Our drought over
Fertile, we dance Springing forth Cosmically, like a Phoenix rising from the flames of burning, bursting passion
- 127 - • Davina Rhine •
We spewed, we prayed Thrust out from the inferno of love Combusting at the center of Chichen Itza In us fire and elements, exploding We make love in our yellow gold We pick up our pieces from where they fell Eating trail-by-trail Tying them together, knotting them back Mending them by hand
Piece of heart, piece of love, piece of soul, piece of mother, piece of father, piece of sister, piece of brother, piece of husband-wife-soul-mate and lover
Winter and summer All life stitched together, held in place by this golden bowl Love eternal we now know.
- 128 - • The Chronicles of the Pharaoh’s Daughter •
Cryptic Lipstick—I Love You
I love you Jason I guess that’s all I can really say I want to marry you—be with you But you must be honest and true
I love you Jason That I know without a doubt I don’t want anyone else It’s you You are it. Me + you
I know I took you for granted And you couldn’t see me/hear me for a while either Nothing we said mattered But we don’t have room for others that don’t belong. They shouldn’t be here Don’t let it ruin us Now or ever again I won’t.
- 129 - • Davina Rhine •
I love you Jason I guess that’s really all I can say I want to marry you—be with you I know it took me night and day To figure out how long I would stay I’m fickle, but I’m loyal But you must be honest and true
I was just waiting for you to grow up And you grew on me too
It’s you that makes me blush Act like a school girl with a crush It’s you that makes me scornful When you have been neglectful Socks and dishes and disagreements
It’s you that makes my pulse race When you’re romantic Candles and roses, poetics and such It’s you that makes me feel cheap When it’s just sex, just a lay Though I get pissed—slow simmering And then hotly speak in silent antics and write all over in cryptic lipstick
- 130 - • The Chronicles of the Pharaoh’s Daughter •
It’s you that makes my heart beat when you’re not breaking it My dreams sing when I have time to sleep My body burns when I’m not exhausted My hope floats when I’m not sinking in despair My love beams when it’s not weighted down with worry and concern
It’s you that I love. Both in the passionate pre-children frenzy that left us lying around all day Making love and then a baby It’s you that I love. Even when you drive me crazy
It’s you that I love In my twenties, and now in my thirties Our middle age, aching bones And extra weight
I love you Jason, my Jason I guess that’s all I can really say.
- 131 - • Davina Rhine •
The Human Heart
This is the human heart that loves you This is my heart It is yours You have held it for years, bruised it some But now you hold it again fully recovered post-surgery Please don’t drop it If you do, it may stop This is the human heart that loves you.
- 132 - • The Chronicles of the Pharaoh’s Daughter •
One Thousand Nights
One-thousand nights and one-thousand olive trees I count on the shores of Greece while I wait for my love to sail back to me
One-thousand nights I pace the castle floors Arguing with suitors who have come for me Cursing the gods in the heavens for their indifference and vanity Crossing the political shore of oracles whose duty it was to take you from me
I plead to deaf skies and moonless nights for you, my lover, to return to me For the stars won’t shine until you kiss me
One-thousand nights of chaos and despair Nothing grows around me in my tartarus.
It’s not fate, but destiny, who shall bring my lover back to me.
One-thousand nights only and not one more.
- 133 - • Davina Rhine •
Lovesick in the Bottom of a Glass
Lovesick in the bottom of a glass Shattered mirrors watch me from beneath my feet Age spots showing on my face Nicks and cuts professin’ red love between my toes Bones speak my story emphasis from my worked hands
Lovesick in the bottom of a glass Looking at a dark, big sky I cry I’m alone tonight like every other Nearby storms have gotten my attention As my heart bleeds through my chest
Lovesick in the bottom of a glass Like salt and fire I extinguish myself from the love we could make If only you were here not behind bars there
- 134 - • The Chronicles of the Pharaoh’s Daughter •
Waitin’ Tickin’ Hoping’ Breathin’ Twitchin’ Swimmin’
I’m in your prison
- 135 - • Davina Rhine •
Love in Pompeii
Love has risen from the past Blood, regret, and hope sewn together, bound together from the destruction and the ash Love gives birth to love again A new city at last Blessed in Pompeii, our marriage to be
Sacred by the gods and goddesses is Venus’s historic City of Love lost, but found again Paradise with a past Vesuvius will erupt when we finally make love at last under her heavens and stars
The Bay of Naples will swell and overflow Her belly full of our desire Misenum will be blessed by our love Herculaneum will rejoice in our rediscovery of eachother Stabiae will dance with Pompeii as our marriage rites are performed in the saved temple of Isis Ancient, renewed, rekindled our lover’s spirits shall be
- 136 - • The Chronicles of the Pharaoh’s Daughter •
Lovers buried in the past will reemerge in the macellum Our history is our world Our journey to feel and touch as we voyage out to meet our loves newfound beginning Our cantherus will be decorated with the relief of our freed love
Craters of fire will simply lift us up close to the heavens and her hope Our love has survived doom and disaster and has been reborn Dormant we were briefly— covered up in our own ash distracted by whores and wine until the fire reached us Her eruption has carried us up to new higher heights Darkness will never block our love from the sun again in Pompeii
The concaved cracks in our floor from the earthquake we will mend as we have before The fallen roofs will be rebuilt Debris and rocks remembered but buried, no longer mourned The farmers have been planting, watering and growing our love again The soil we shall embrace on will be rich, fertile, and sweet
- 137 - • Davina Rhine •
We are out of the gladiator’s barracks, my love Our love has survived the fight. Now let’s welcome the night with celebration of fought for kisses Let’s dance around the pillars at the Villa of Diomedes What remains of us, is stronger than what we have taken from one another
Where we make love in the gardens new flowers will grow We will leave Pompeii richer than any Roman with bags of gold For what we have and what we hold is eachother
The Ring Lady welcomes us into the Lover’s Gates We need no skeleton frescos, my love to remind us life is short, for we now know our love is long.
- 138 - • The Chronicles of the Pharaoh’s Daughter •
The Angels Have Come Knockin’
The angels have come knockin’ wanting some place to stay They look through peepholes and windows trying to see me They look under my bushes to see if my desires can be found there They look through my flower garden hoping to seduce me For some reason they want my attention
The angels have come knockin’ I cracked the door with the chain still on just to hear what they want to sell me I close the door and loosen my robe My couch is cold My bed is even colder as I wait for my sinner to come home My heart is like tepid water, lukewarm and still —not even angel’s auras arouse it
The angels have come knockin’ To see if they give Snow White a kiss if she will awaken She’s not buyin’ They knock and knock hoping for a space in my heart They finally give up Leaving their sighing, frowning flowers at the door Their molten chocolate truffles melting on my porch floor
- 139 -
The Queen
We All Walk the Path Again “Not in strength are we inferior to men; the same our eyes, our limbs the same; one common light we see, one air we breathe; nor different is the food we eat. What then denied to us hath heaven on man bestowed.”
—Amazon Queen Penthesilea
These words were spoken by her at Troy, before a battle, during the Trojan War. • The Chronicles of the Pharaoh’s Daughter •
The Goddess’s Table
There is something that I cannot hide, that contradicts my love of life, and my severe disappointment with our Western world’s prescribed and described Christian God
Taught to me as a child, his word ended my way leaving fear of his wrath in its wake In defiance, out of the ashes of ignorance, I wakened I found a higher calling, the right path for me
He in the hand of man wrote a book called the Bible It redefined paganism, and cannibalized it The world’s ancient and pre-Christian religions, all were all lumped into a fiery lake of crimson
He mistook traditional pagan celebrations, dates, and re-wrote them as Christian God proclaimed us through his mighty pen, as dead He borrowed all of our holidays and feasts When we tried to join in and hold hands, he disgraced us and deemed us sinners! For believing in the serpent and the sword! The only blood we saw was of birth, women, sacrifice or war, not of Christ!
God the Christian belittled our Goddesses, to icons and idolatry He dismissed women’s natural positions of authority, and leadership
- 145 - • Davina Rhine •
He didn’t acknowledge our roles as mothers, warriors, hunters, gatherers, weavers, carpenters, healers, or diplomats We were now denied our rightful place in our families, communities, and tribes We weren’t part of humanity He forsaked us, took our own religion and defaced us Though it had more do with man and papacy, and little to do with God Man replaced us and left us unprotected by our own laws We were defiled and raped by our own brothers, even by our own children. The sons of our Mothers The sons of the Earth
What changed during the transition from matriarchy to patriarchy? That decreed this?
What else can we do? What else can I do? Weep?
No longer, not here For I have found the God within me, and he is a She Do not fear, or be afraid, I was a Druid long before God found his own way,
- 146 - • The Chronicles of the Pharaoh’s Daughter •
I sat at the king’s table before Morgan la Faye. I was dust before dust I was sexuality before it had a name I am a Goddess where there had been none! God cannot challenge me for now I know who I am!
We all walk the path again.
- 147 - • Davina Rhine •
Medusa: The Legacy of the Crown
She walks into the cooling shades of the turquoise waters. The sun is falling behind her. The opening of the night is wide and vast, just like her soul. The hissing of her crown of snakes conceals her angered sobs. She is both branded and banished. She lives a lie, and yet her existence is denied. Medusa is the wicked lover, the wicked woman. Medusa is a woman scorned and cursed. Medusa is the testament of the concealed rage of woman, and yet also her story tells of the fear men have of women. She is the written myth. She is the written word. It is said that men’s fear of women is rooted in woman’s ability to give birth. Men created mystical and magical blood rituals during matriarchal society to give birth also, to creativity and power, in essence to duplicate the mystical act of birth itself. Instead of giving birth to magic, it eventually gave birth to jealousy, domination and enslavement. Why should Medusa conceal her rage? Why should she not turn her enemies into stone? Why should women avoid confrontation and not seek revenge? Why should women not seek retribution? In patriarchy, women have been treated very badly, unlike men in fraternal and semi-pre-history matriarchy. Her myth is poetic justice. Medusa’s madness, speaks of the silent madness that women have endured, as women have been forced out of all arenas of life, all entitlements of human and humane existence, except for the limitations of our homes, be it rich or poor, and of course our husbands beds (or as Poseidon’s and Zeus’s rape victims), yet that is another story, a modern story.
- 148 - • The Chronicles of the Pharaoh’s Daughter •
The new myth is still a work evolving as we force open the doors; address the denials, the injustices, and the violence. As we ourselves become the collective force of the enraged, enflamed, darkened, blackened pool of women’s psyche. Are we not Medusa herself? Men of high esteem and respect had deemed women unnatural, especially women like Medusa, while men were the natural superior. The men with new religions, swift pens, bloody wars, and violent fists endorsed it. Even women believed they were inferior: they had deserved what they had gotten or has asked for it somehow, or there was no purpose in going after what they have been denied. Perhaps, that in itself is yet another myth. However, I think Medusa has been underestimated. I think that women have also been underestimated. She comes out of the turquoise waters, cold. Her anger has calmed into resolution and action. Mother Nature has crowned her head with the snakes of her divine will. Every snake has an appointment with destiny. She is the swift sword of justice. She storms into towns, her snakes patiently waiting to strike, accuse, judge and sentence. Her strong arms will pry open the Gates of Hell, to free the children, the mothers, the slaves, the whores, the women. The oral tradition of storytelling, has given her a most difficult task, to also free the minds of the women, daughters, and children. Medusa has no interest in freeing the minds of poisoned men or culture, let them fear her wrath. They have set out on their own path of destruction, and for far too long women and children have been caught in their web of greed and lust. Medusa has now been called into battle, to ultimately destroy. She will not rest until her vengeance has been satisfied. Grievous sins have been committed; she is the warrior who will slay the slayer. She is Isis and Ishtar. Medusa is the fate waiting for the wicked, deceitful, and unearthly. She will lure them in with the
- 149 - • Davina Rhine • only gift that patriarchy has claimed as a woman’s own, the gift of sex and entrapment. She will digest the wicked and give birth to their skulls. Medusa is a woman in bondage, breaking bondage. Why should Medusa’s snakes only be seen as a monstrosity? Her snakes are a historical testament to the survival of women, self-defense. The snakes are born out of knowledge, judgment, difficulty, destruction, chaos, rape, Hygeia’s crucifixion, ancient totems, ancient wisdom, ancient craft, birth, betrayal, and death. The snakes are the reminder of what Poseidon did to her (how rape becomes love in classically refurbished mythology still puzzles me), they are the symbolic manifestation of what women of the centuries, from antiquity until now, have endured. They are the psychic turmoil, the angst of survival. The snakes are the ramifications of the denial of the Goddess, the denial of woman. Medusa’s tale gives expression to where there has been pain and betrayal. Patriarchal women have been historically betrayed by our fathers, brothers, mothers, teachers, children, churches, lovers, soldiers, governments, doctors, bosses, and leaders. Medusa has been betrayed by an entire civilization, and so have we. She is Gaia, her experience is ours. Medusa’s voice is heard, her face seen, giving a conceivable and recognizable image to the pain, anger, and hatred that have been the deliberate ill fate of women. Medusa is an icon that incorporates fierce anger, deadly fear, irrepressible will, immeasurable strength, conviction, courage and awe. She is a force that has yet to be reckoned with. She is both legacy and majesty. Her story and her crown of snakes are our unwritten history. She has given birth to the testament of where women have been, where we are, and it is up to us where we are going. She is Medusa.
- 150 - • The Chronicles of the Pharaoh’s Daughter •
Evicting Cyril
Through houses of time Stars carry her in space symmetrically, exponentially, Hypatia of Alexandria
Fate and murder her conjunction for philosophical and mystical dimensions Her higher form Elevated by the wanderers, who held her gaze
Apollonius, did you know? Diopantus—could you see? Euclid, had you any foresight? Ptolemy—did you know, did you know?
That the daughter of Theon was about to be crucified?
Neo-Platonist, they branded her with their roof tiles and potshards. Witch! Witch! Witch! The burned her, temptress! They slaughtered her with knifes in God’s new house, a Christianized Caesareum, the sacrificial lamb for their feast
- 151 - • Davina Rhine •
They toasted themselves with lust of political power, and beheaded her, Hypatia— the inventor of the modern Astrolabe and Hydrometer— for their own ignorant crimes They dreamed of carnage and Babylon, and she died Bishop Cyril cementing his power in the seed of her annihilation, and the hastening of the dark ages.
The Church gives birth to woman-death Death of science and math Death of heart and spirit Death of possibility and astronomy The holy trinity
Cyril the Christian, opposed the practice of the sciences— in fear of his god, power(lessness), he banned the planets, slayed their goddess
Why did Synesius, her pupil, and Latter-day Saint, not foresee this?
John of Nikiu justified the spilling of her blood, and the breaking of her bones, whispered wishes from the mouth of Cyril into his ear Cyril’s promises blinded them by gold and treasure
- 152 - • The Chronicles of the Pharaoh’s Daughter •
Cyril and the Catholic Church are Guilty The men of Nikiu blamed her for their own lust and temptations Refusing to fall into sin with them they savagely dismantled her, ordaining the Pope’s Churches with her relics women were left fallen, disgraced
Her crime was befriending the Imperial Perfect of Alexandria, Orestes, joining him in opposition to the attacks Archbishop Cyril sanctioned against the Jews committed by The Pack of the 500
The Monks of Nitria, Cleopatra’s city now overrun by their clergy Cyril rewarded them richly for their barbaric mercenary deeds, and promised to do it again with Hypatia’s demise for to rule Egypt in 350 AD, was to rule the world from the center, too much of a temptation even for one as pious as he Crowned saint he would be Villains and vampires; rogues in church’s robes hunting, this time not for Jews, but for a worldly and womanly mathematician
Peter the Lector/Peter the Reader and his army blocked her carriage on Lent and dragged her from it The Pack of 500 killed her on the floor of their master’s church Battering her with roofing tiles on man’s holy day. But not until after they stripped her of her scholar’s tribon and devoured her flesh, as Cyril looked on content, fat and blessed
- 153 - • Davina Rhine •
Jesus hung on the cross bloody above her . . . watching both his mother and his wife Mary weep, as God raped Hypatia
In frenzy, they tore her body apart and limb-from-limb from her corpse they ripped; orgiastically transporting her body and burning her like incense, in church portals
Burning with her, the Academy of Athens These men destroyed the Temple of Serapis and the museum school, her school Revered teacher, classical and brilliantly Hellenistic— slain by men of the ordained dark robe
They canonized her with their fists and teeth and blunt objects
Hypatia was not Cyril’s first hit, like a mob-man he ordered from the sanctity of his elevated and ornate view:
Midnight Murder of the Jews His now infamous first hit, on Orestes (His last obstacle to complete power) The adultery committed by Saint Ammonius (the admirable) Thaumasius, Then on disobedient Hypatia, who knew more than he, especially of planets and gods . . . The government prayed to Constiapole to save Alexandria, or intervene on their behalf, with the church whose torture and abuse had been unleashed
- 154 - • The Chronicles of the Pharaoh’s Daughter •
Instead, like the Mary’s, the church defiled her memory, and the New Rome sanctioned Cyril’s devilish sainthood
Cyril’s, ‘Ceremony of Canonization’, is steeped in her ruins and archeological remains.
“[After Hypatia’s death]All the people surrounded the patriarch Cyril and named him the ‘new Theophilus; for he had destroyed the last remains of idolatry in the city.”—John of Nikiu
- 155 - • Davina Rhine •
The Great Goddess Temple: The Beginning and the End, the Future and the Past.
My temple is to be a metaphor for the beginning and the end, the future and the past. Approximately 5,000 years ago the world started changing from a matriarchal society with nature and birth religion at its core. Gradually the newly formed patriarchal tribes of Assyria (?) started invading the domain of the matriarchal tribes of the world. This resulted in repeated and
- 156 - • The Chronicles of the Pharaoh’s Daughter • disastrous conflict which the last remnants of these stories are preserved in the qualities associated with the goddesses as well as the historical documentations of the varied Amazon tribes from Africa, Libya, Turkey, Briton and Greece. The Amazon tribes were the last of our matriarchal lineage. Their last efforts for survival which are legendary now (as well as then) are the gateway to our beginnings, as well as the end of our beginnings. Today we are still fighting their battle in a world dominated by men at the expense of women and children. Thru this pocket of time we have ancient remnants of our history. The Amazon Warriors were the last of their kind, the last of the matriarchal tribes. Their history is recorded in Greek legend and supported by recent unrelated archeological finds of Amazon Queens from Africa, Turkey and Greece itself. (This is supported by archaeologist Jeannine Davis-Kimball.) Remnants of the mysteries of matriarchal society and religion are found in the surviving face of the goddess herself which has survived time in spite of the global society that denies women equality. My temple dedication starts with the one of the oldest but first defined goddesses Ishtar. Ishtar was a Mesopotamian goddess who was the Goddess of both War and Love. Through Ishtar many more goddesses were born including Maat, and Artemis, who is said to be the last goddess replaced only some six hundred years ago by the Christian Virgin Mary. What is interesting is that in the post-pagan Babylon and monolithic Christian culture a ‘demon’ named Lilith was born, who is very similar to Ishtar, even in appearance. They both are Babylonian and both have wings. However, unlike Ishtar, Lilith was made a mockery of and reduced to a sexual object of temptation and wickedness. This is contrary to the worship of Ishtar who was feared, loved, and respected. Ishtar, of course, is a distinguished decedent of the more rudimentary goddesses which mark our evolution from goddess artifacts such as Venus
- 157 - • Davina Rhine • at Willendorf and the disputed finds at Catalhoyuk. Through Ishtar we see the history of women who are strong leaders and warriors ranging from Cleopatra to Amazon Queens like Penthesilea, Myrina, and the Celtic Queen Boudicca. The temple itself is very diverse, but architecturally designed to be true to the ancient styles. The core floor plan is Roman. It is fashioned after the Roman Temple of Vesta in Tivoli. The temple is circular as well as the altar. The circular motion is consistent with goddess worship and the wholeness of, and the continuing of, earth cycles. In goddess and nature religions you find a lot of spirals and circular art which is a manifest of humanity’s relationship with each other and the earth and its cycles. One distinguishing difference in my floor plan is that the porch is completely round and wraps around the entire temple welcoming all from all points of entry. In fact, the temple is absent of any straight line that would interrupt the worshipper on their path to the altar, or the Great Goddess herself. My temple also has distinguishing Greek influences as well. The columns are Ionic with the circular volutes. The circular volutes correspond with the circularity of the temple. At the center of the circle or spiral is the origin of life. In addition to this the Ionic columns are each decorated and dedicated to a mythical or historical goddess. This is similar to the Caratid Porch on the Erechtheion in Athens, Greece. I wanted to honor the universality of heroic women and the goddess-spirit which is evident in all cultures regardless of how suppressed, then and now, they (women and women’s spirituality) may be. Even their histories have been suppressed from the world for centuries, but truth has found its way out and they are finally being authenticated. My temple has Egyptian wall carvings and hieroglyphics, as well as Roman and Greek relief carvings. I looked to Nefertiti as a leader and queen, and both the ancient and more Hellenistic
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Artemis Temples and their deities for influence. The goddess has survived through all of these patriarchal societies and we shall see her defiance honored through these women and designs as well. Nefertiti as co-regent and later pharaoh of Egypt was widely immortalized in wall carvings and art that adorned the columns and cities of the capitol Tell el Armana. There were many goddesses and women of history from the ancient to 1450 C.E. that I wanted to immortalize through my temple. I had to choose fourteen primaries for the columns and I selected them based on overall historical and cultural impact. I did however, want to tell the stories of the others via a pantheon through the wall carvings and reliefs that decorate the steps of the porch and line the floor and the roof. I also chose to represent two worship styles within my temple. In keeping with the Minoan tradition and Lesbos tradition I did place an altar on the main floor that is roofed for worship. But also keeping with the core of ancient nature religion, as well as the religion of Nefertiti and her husband Akhenaton, I placed a Great Goddess Statue on the top of the roof which is completely surrounded by the elements including Artemis’s moon and Nefertiti’s Sun God Aton. The Temple of Alexander also shares similar qualities of gods and goddesses and human rulers along the walls and in the decorative masonry. I looked to both the ancient temple of Artemis of Corfu for the frieze of relief styles. The decoration on the other hand was inspired directly by the Temple of Artemis in Ephesus which is one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World. The ionic columns are finished in bronze, and the pillars and masonry is red with hints of black and gold (as some historians and academics have speculated that Artemis’s temple in Ephesus was). According to Greek legend it was the Amazon Queens Hipp & Marpesia that founded the cities Ephesus, Smyrna, Cyrene, and
- 159 - • Davina Rhine •
Myrine. Hipp is also credited in legend for making the Temple to Artemis in Ephesus. Alexander the Great was born the night it was burned down. He promised later to rebuild it. Symbolic to this promise was not just his birth but also his relationship to one of the last Amazon Queens Thalestris. I chose the red and black colors based on their relationship to the Temple of Artemis at Ephesus, but also because they coincide artistically with the Greek Vase Painting that recorded the history of the Amazons and their depictions via both the black-figured and white-figured amphora pottery. I also incorporated some amphorae in the designs as well. Interesting also though is that Ishtar’s lions that guarded the gates of Babylon were also golden with black and red coloring. Although the Romans did have statues on top of their roofs, such as the Temple of Jupiter Capitolinus in Rome, I wanted to achieve something that compelled the worshiper to look up to the heavens and see the final representation of the Great Goddess. I followed the gothic fashion by creating just one statue on top that’s larger than life. It is Romanesque though since it is not thin but robust and less refined. It does achieve however the same effect as the cathedral roof and points. This also relates to the era of the saint and warrior, Joan of Arc, who was murdered by the medieval church during the 100 Year War between France and England. Joan of Arc is one of the fourteen heroic women also honored in my temple. The center statue on the main floor is of Artemis since she was the last goddess per se for whom a temple was erected. However, the statue on the roof of the temple is of the less defined, broader, mystical Great Goddess who is symbolic to the origins of the beginning. The historical figures greeting you as you walk around the temple and enter are the faces of history . . . looking at you bravely and with honor and courage.
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The temple signifies the end with Artemis and the ancient warriors who are taking us back to the beginning through the Great Goddess. The women of today are the present and it is up to us if the goddess continues to survive and what our fates will be by the choices we make in spite of oppression. We are the survivors and the warriors are looking at us to be today’s leaders and tomorrow’s goddesses so that humanity and the Earth may survive, and live with hope, passion, fairness and equality.
Sources:
Architecture and Nefertiti: 1. Humanities Book: The Creative Impulse Sixth Edition Dennis J. Sporre Various sources for goddess information, art and history: (Most of them were academic sources online) interoz.com/egypt/cleopatr.htm ce.eng.usf.edu/pharos/Wonders/index.html touregypt.net/featurestories/agt.htm www.pantheon.org/articles/a/artemis.htm www.whoosh.org/issue12/ruffel3.html witcombe.sbc.edu/snakegoddess/aegeanmatriliny.html www.arthistory.sbc.edu/imageswomen/ homepage.mac.com/cparada/GML/000Free/000Artemis/ source/1.html www.piney.com www.arthistory.sbc.edu/imageswomen/ inanna.virtualave.net/menu.html#achaos1.hypermart.net/ www.net4you.co.at/users/poellauerg/Amazons/aim.html
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The Modern Athena
The Modern Athena is seeing the world through 21st century eyes She is the cervix worker The muted maid The discarded wife The burned lover The overworked mother The denied peace maker and artist
With battle cries she wages her campaign She feels caged . . . stuck in Walmart pin-stripes and promises of 401k’s six weeks FMLA still making much less for doing the same Family Friendly Work Policies just really means, “suck it up” Take your pump to the bathroom with your powder and your tampon Blood and milk mix becoming nuclear
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The Modern Athena views democracy’s sexism as a failure She has been waiting, for progress for thousands of years Now she’s ready for war, revenge for the destruction of Themyscira and everything sacred since
She prepares for battle, sharpening her swords and her wit She calls for the New Supper with her Amazons and her audience is the modern woman Her agenda is to slaughter the ass-grabbers the rapists the bosses who make a woman choose between work and a needy or sickly child again and again The bosses who want you to give life, liberty, soul, and death all in return for just a meager paycheck The earth plunderers The under-payers The exploiters The unfair law-makers Congress will be burned red Every man on those seats who have not done women and children right
- 163 - • Davina Rhine • will be destroyed and forgotten Every father/husband who has not respected his wife and daughters will be blinded Every tongue that soiled women’s name and hindered humanity’s progress will be cut out
The Modern Athena won’t just be the next president but rule immortal with the heart of Leonidas and Gorgo, the mind of Boudicca and her tribes, the military brilliance of Alexander, the aim of Artemis, the intellect of Hypatia
The Modern Athena is many She will not be subdued, overruled, or torn apart by men and their wicked leaders or built by up material gods Her temples will no longer contain her She will take the sons back from the corruption of patriarchy Giving them birth anew, fathers like Bachofen and Theon Mentors like ER, Mead, Stanton, Goldman, Chicago, Walker, Clinton with Amazonian mothers and queens from all over the globe
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The Modern Athena’s eyes are heavy and somber No more Vietnams No more African genocides No more dowries No more gang-rapes No more corporate genocide No more stoning No more hungry children No more neglected children No more latch-key kids No more dead-beat-dads No more oil for water Cut-throat corn and potatoes
Life is slipping away from women who have been overruled by their men and the men of others Women with no rooms Women whose voices have been silenced with violence whose daughters and sons have been ignored The daughters rejected . . . except by property-ownership-marriage and enslavement motherhood, a man’s in-house play-bunny The sons taunted and tormented by . . . fathers, uncles, leaders, teachers, friends into the macho-mold until they too can repeat the patterns of the past on tomorrows wives, lovers, mothers and daughters
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The Modern Athena spits back She is giving birth to a new Crete A new race of women and children her afterbirth will give us Atlantis redeemed Lesbos reborn She is going to take her battle ax, and kill Zeus.
- 166 - Fate is both about choices made and opportunities given, and thus destiny is made.
Davina Rhine spends her days chasing the goddess and dharma, and writing all about it. She is a socially aware, political activist that lives in Texas with her amazing family. Her first book Rebel Moms: The Off-Road Map for the Off-Road Mom was published in 2011, which has received great reviews from BUST Magazine & Hip Mama Zine. She has written essays, fiction, poetry, music and book reviews for: Altar Magazine of NYC, The Women’s Press, Women’s United Nations Report Network, and the Feminist Review. She is currently researching and writing The Authorized Biography of Janis Martin: The Female Elvis.
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