The Blue Vineyard Of Voo Shining Stone: May 2020

Sunday, May 31, 2020

I Play For You a Violin repost

I Play for you a Violin

I play for you a violin

And song so soft and sweet

I keep my eyes downcast, demure

As I sit at your feet.

I play for hours at your request

Till time has lost it's meaning

And candles burn down to their wicks

And night is slowly weaning.

Before the dawn has fully come

You hold your hand up high

And bid me stop my melody

Arise and say goodbye.

You do not look back at my face

Tearstung and raised to light

You do not see the love I bear

As you pass from my sight.

A servant girl, that's all I am

With gifted hands to play

Sweet melodies to comfort you

From torments of your day.

A king of royal dynasty

A man of power and yet

You find no peace in power's grasp

No love in life's plan set.

And so I play and so you listen

In silence, just we two

Night after night till daylight breaks

And my heart breaks for you.

You have no inkling of the love

I feel there as I play

Pretending you are mine alone

Till morn takes you away.

To kingly duties, kingly demands

The power of life and death

There in your words, there in your hands

There in your very breath.

All day I wait till midnight comes

For the summon and the call

Your weary face so full of woe

Till at your feet I fall.

And I play for you my violin

Pray peace into the gloom

Wait for your sigh with tear filled eyes

As my love fills up the room.

©by Voo

April 28, 2007

3:45 p.m.

The Man of Contradictions

(The Man of
Contradictions)

I loved a man of contradictions

Who none of his promises kept

He wrote pages of poetry about wiping my tears

But he was the reason I wept.

I told him all about myself

My dreams, my fears, my hope

But when I queried a simple question

With that he could not cope.

He wrote of gods and goddesses

Of Poseidon under the sea

He wrote long poems about mists and mysteries

But few of his love for me.

And if he did, it was a series

Of questions without end

That took you down such winding roads

And back where they'd begin.

And you never got an answer

To any question asked

Not about the future

And not about the past.

The more you learned, the less you knew

And life went on the same

And all you knew at the end of the day

Was his last and given name.

Oh, he could tell you about magic

Or Medusa with snakes in her hair

And he could write books about Lilith's good looks

But about him, he had little to share.

Such a contradiction, was this man

Always secretly, carefully contained

He could charm and be bold till the unknown turned you cold

He could obtain love but could not love sustain.

He didn't lie but he didn't tell you the truth

He just omitted all the simple everyday facts

We'd talk for hours about every kind of thing

But I never knew what lived behind the mask.

How can you love a man that you don't really know?

How can you long for one who does not care?

How can you believe he'll be there and not leave you

When every time you turn, he is not there.

The man of contradictions

The darkness and the light

Rolled into one, the fear and the fun

But only real in the dreams of the night.

I never was sure where I stood

Never was sure how he felt

He seemed to think I should just be so happy

With the mysterious cards that he dealt.

But I was never happy

And never satisfied

For he never gave me enough to be

And the gulf was always wide.

His joy could be contagious

And you hoped that it was true

And then from out of nowhere

He'd turn and blindside you.

And you never saw it coming

Or knew from whence it came

And you wondered what on earth you'd done

And why you felt such shame.

Eggshells were the carpets you walked then

You had to tread so light

Because you never knew what made

His sunshine turn to night.

I loved him, oh, I loved him!

With all my heart and soul

But I never was a priority

A need, desire or goal.

I don't know what I meant to him

If indeed, meant any thing

In light of the way it all fell away

When I woke from that indecipherable dream.

The man of contradictions

And complexities so deep

He'll never share his heart with me

And his secrets will always keep.

And our love will fade into the mist

Like a cloud into the blue

And none of the dreams I shared with him

Will I ever see come true.

I stood and I waited, he walked away

I wanted the joy, and he chose the woe

God put together what his fear tore asunder

And that fairytale ending now, we'll never know.

©by Voo Shining Stone

😥💔

The Blue Vineyard of Voo Shining Stone: LIVING INSIDE MY HEAD (for the saddest man I know...

The Blue Vineyard of Voo Shining Stone: LIVING INSIDE MY HEAD (for the saddest man I know...: Living Inside My Head ( poem from a lonely man) My imagination runs wild sometimes and sometimes I reign it in My mind goes off into ...

START WITH THE ENDING

Great words from David Wilcox

Saturday, May 30, 2020

Inside The Bud

Inside The Bud

Inside the bud, the bloom

Inside the bloom, the scent

Inside the scent, the memory

Of all that you have meant.

Inside my mind, the pictures

Inside my heart, the joy

Inside the pictures, the progression

Of the true man from the boy.

Inside the boy, the lover

Who longed to be set free

To be loved and be loving

And who now lives to love me.

spur of the moment

by Voo©

Feb 19, 2020

upon seeing this rose

Friday, May 29, 2020

Tuesday, May 26, 2020

The Only One For Me

The Only One For Me by John Trudell

The Only One For Me

You're my prayer's answer

My song's refrain

My cloud, my sky, my sun and rain

You are my passion

My heart's desire

My night, my day, my warming fire

You are my sweetness

My spirit's soar

My dance, my music, my reason for

You are my light

My soul's embrace

My other self that wears your face

You are my treasure

My hidden gold

My wealth, the depth, cannot be told

You are my blessing

My greatest gift

My joy that gives this life a lift

You are my lover

My dearest friend

My best companion that's ever been

You are my heart

My need to be

My love till ends eternity

You are the only one for me.

©By Voo

Sept 19, 10

1:45 a.m.

IN MEMORY OF MY BELOVED POET FRIEND,

JOHN TRUDELL R.I.P. MY BROTHER

John Trudell as "Jimmy Looks Twice in the
1992 motion picture
THUNDERHEART

The Life and Work of
JOHN TRUDELL

Most Californians familiar with the life and work of John Trudell, who died December 8, 2015 will likely categorize his political work as "Native Rights Activism." And that's not unreasonable: Trudell identified first and foremost as an activist speaking out for the rights of North America's original inhabitants. As a broadcaster, a poet-musician, and the first Chairman of the American Indian Movement, Trudell raised the profile of the grassroots Native Rights movement.

But Trudell didn't pigeonhole his activism. He was an environmental activist as well, and an anti-war and social justice activist, and his work for a healthier, more peaceful world flowed from the same philosophical wellspring as his work for Native people's rights. "It's about our D and A," Trudell said in 1997. "Descendants and ancestors. We are the descendants and we are the ancestors. D and A, our DNA, our blood, our flesh and our bone, is made up of the metals and the minerals and the liquids of the earth. We are the earth. We truly, literally and figuratively are the earth."

That activism did not come without cost. Early on in his activist career, the FBI began to target Trudell, whose FBI file was at one point the largest ever compiled on an individual American citizen. And in 1979, amid increasing threats from opponents of his activism, John Trudell suffered one of the worst tragedies imaginable, in what many still feel was direct retaliation for the activist work of Trudell and his wife, Tina Manning.

Founded in 1968 in the wake of the Alcatraz Occupation, the American Indian Movement had always paid attention to environmental problems, which often affected Native people disproportionately. By 1979 that focus had become explicit, and AIM was working hand-in-hand with anti-nuclear groups on issues such as the proposed expansion of gold and uranium mining in South Dakota's Black Hills.

As Trudell got more active on the national scene, Tina Manning became an effective activist back in her hometown, on the Duck Valley Shoshone-Paiute Reservation in northern Nevada. The daughter of Tribal leaders, Manning had met Trudell in 1971 at Tulsa University in Oklahoma. The couple had returned to Manning's hometown to raise a family, with Manning working on local issues while Trudell traveled more widely.

Among the issues facing Duck Valley's native residents was diversion of the water in the Owyhee River for agriculture. Native people had relied on salmon and steelhead in the Owyhee for centuries, but in the 19th Century the local Shoshone and Paiute lost some of their legal rights to the water in favor of the new settlers with their exotic legal codes. Irrigation projects in the 20th Century did major damage to the salmon and steelhead runs.

A settlement of sorts was reached on Duck Valley water rights in 2007, but in 1979 that settlement was far in the future. Manning, as a well-respected local girl with a good education and remarkable political savvy, set to work uniting the occasionally fractious residents of the Duck Valley reservation to advocate for their fair share of the Owyhee's water from the nearby Wildhorse Reservoir, encountering vehement opposition from the local (white) powers that be, as well as from the federal Bureau of Indian Affairs.

Meanwhile, Trudell was involved in AIM organizing on a national scale. The group was ramping up activism in coalition with antinuclear groups in the Black Hills -- a ceremonial walk would take place through the Hills that year, and a global International Survival Gathering was already being planned in the Black Hills for the next year.

Meanwhile AIM's and Trudell's work continued on social justice issues less-directly related to the environment, including the continuing legal fallout from conflict between Native Activists and the FBI at Wounded Knee, South Dakota in 1972. On February 11, 1979, at a demonstration outside FBI Headquarters in Washington, DC, Trudell gave an impassioned speech and then lit an American flag on fire.

A few hours later, at 1:30 a.m. on February 12, a fire of suspicious origin consumed the Duck Valley house of Arthur Manning, Tina's father. Tina Manning, her mother, and Manning and Trudell's three children -- Ricarda Star (age 5), Sunshine Karma (3), and Eli Changing Sun (1) -- died in that fire, as did Manning's unborn child, whom she and Trudell had named Josiah Hawk.

The Bureau of Indian Affairs investigated the fire and deemed it "accidental," a finding that few familiar with the case take seriously. Trudell had received threats of violence related to his work, but as he pointed out in the 2005 documentary Trudell "For anyone to think that what happened to her happened to her as specifically something just related to me, it minimizes who she is."

"I died then," Trudell said. "I had to die in order to get through it... and if I can get through it, maybe I could learn how to live again. Putting my love into the ground like this, putting my love in boxes, putting them into the ground and covering them up reconnected me to the Earth."

If the juxtaposition of Native and environmental issues in the context of the deaths of Tina Manning and her children with Trudell seems unusual, it's not.

In 2014, the group Global Witness reported that more than 900 environmental activists had been murdered in retaliation for their efforts to protect the planet between 2002 and 2013, with the annual death toll rising almost every year. Worldwide, a sobering percentage of those environmentalists targeted have been indigenous activists, for whom the struggles to protect their local landscape and their cultures are usually irrevocably intertwined.

Trudell lived for almost 37 years after losing Manning and their children. (That's longer than the entire lifespan of David "Gypsy" Chain, whose activism and untimely death we'll also be covering in this series.) In that timespan Trudell's activism only increased.

He spoke at the Black Hills Survival Gathering in 1980, participated in the massive protests and civil disobedience against the as-yet-uncommissioned Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant in 1981, and was involved in environmental causes to numerous to mention, from the movement to legalize industrial hemp to efforts to protect Yellowstone's bison.

His writing, an outlet to which he turned in the wake of his family's deaths, brought awareness to global audiences who might not have been receptive to political polemic.

Of all the words Trudell spoke over the years -- and there are many -- few get at the core of who Trudell really was more directly than some from an address he gave at that 1997 event in Berkeley, a memorial for activist Judi Bari, who we will likewise discuss in this series. At that event, Trudell said:

We live under an authoritarian system, an industrial technologic mind set that has discovered and developed a way to mine, to take the being part of human, the spirit part of human and convert it into energy and then use that energy to power their system, to run their system. They are literally eating our spirits. Literally eating our spirits...

But the antibiotic to dealing with these people, these vampires -- and it is, it is vampires, cannibalization -- the antibiotic to this disease is our intelligence. We were given intelligence by the creator. We have intelligence. That is the antibiotic. That is the cure.

There is no existing cure to the problem other than the one we will create by using our intelligence as intelligently and as clearly as we possibly can. To use our intelligence as intelligently as we possibly can.

On December 8, 2015, the day he died, Trudell posted a last message for friends and fans on his Facebook page. "My ride showed up," it read. "Celebrate Love. Celebrate Life."

Born: February 15, 1946, Omaha, NE

Died: December 8, 2015, Santa Clara County, California, CA

Books: Lines from a Mined Mind, Stickman: John Trudell Poems, Lyrics, Talks, a Conversation, Indigo rouges

Children: Sunshine Karma Trudell, Eli Changing Sun Trudell, Ricarda Star Trudell

Trudell's poetry and performance developed simultanesously in the 1980s. He began setting his poetry to Native American music in 1982, the year his first chapbook, Living in Reality, was published. The following year, his debut album Tribal Voice appeared. His musical work garnered him supporters such as Bob Dylan, Willie Nelson, Jackson Browne, Bonnie Raitt, and John Fogerty. Many of Trudell's other 14 albums, including AKA Graffiti Man (1986), But This Isn’t El Salavador(1987), and Heart Jump Bouquet (1987), received critical acclaim. His album Bone Days (2001) was produced by Angelina Jolie. His lyrics are collected in the book Lines from a Mined Mind (2008, Fulcrum Press).

Actor (7 Credits) The 11th Hour (Movie) 2007. Trudell (Movie) 2006. Smoke Signals (Movie) Randy Peone 1998. Extreme Measures (Movie) Tony 1996. On Deadly Ground (Movie) Johnny Redfeather 1994. Incident At Oglala (Movie) 1992. Thunderheart (Movie) Jimmy Looks Twice 1992.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dlcmTeCcbME
TRUDELL.... THE MOVIE