collab

Tuesday, January 29, 2019

I CALLED UNTO THE NIGHT




 this music inspired the write
please play now







I Called Unto The Night



I called unto the night
And night was silent
I called unto the winds
They wouldn't blow

I called unto my love
And love was hiding
I asked the sky to find him
It said "No"

I asked the underworld
If he was sleeping
If he had fallen
Dying like a leaf

I begged for hope
But there was no hope offered
No angel came
To comfort me in grief

I called to science to help me
And to magic
I couldn't live without him
Or his love

I called to love itself
And it was listening
There in the secret place
It dwells above

I called unto the sun
It wouldn't shine
But shrank and hid itself
Behind the moon

I prayed unto the heavens
They were distant
But love whispered "Have some faith
You'll see him soon"

I called within my dreams
And there I found him
Laughing with the smile
 He often wore

I called his name
And up the trail he hastened
Grabbed me in his arms
There at the door

I woke in morning
And he was not there with me
I looked for him on ocean
And on land

I sought his face
Without his love to guide me
But all I held
Was just my empty hand

I called unto the night
And then it answered
"Nothing in this life
 Is as it seems"

"You'll never find your love
When you're awakened
For he is waiting for you
In your dreams"

And so I slept forever
As the night fell
And covered me with stars
From heaven's skies

And saw my love
Just waiting in the distance
With all the love I longed for
In his eyes.



©by Voo
Jan 29, 2019
11:40 a.m.


Sunday, January 27, 2019

DELUSION CONCEDING






Delusion Conceding



Flashing spanish eyes
Stare me down
Into embers of fire
And I melt into dew
At the sound of your voice
My once and ever love
Lost in the memories
Of drowning men
And I, the survivor of your hurricane.

We meet upon the shore
Of renewed acquaintance
Filled with longing 
And passion akin to terror
You and I, the victor and the victim
You, the sword and I, the blood upon the blade.

You do not know
The nights that passed before
As torment grasped me by the heart
And shook me till I wept
Crying like a man who's lost his soul
Dying like a man who hates his life.

As all the while
Your treacherous eyes
Looked elsewhere for their treasure
But not at me, for you had stripped me bare,
Left this barely beating heart 
Held captive in your chains.

Till now, you come
And now I fall before you
But only in my heart, my pride is much too hurt
I stand as still as stone
As your beguiling face approaches
Calling me to days long gone
And willing me to smile.

Confusion clouds your midnight eyes
When you see I do not falter
Nor do I run to catch you up
Or taste the lips that lie
I only stand, though in my heart I grovel like a beggar
Holding out a begging bowl
With my eyes downcast in shame.

You look at me
As though you're looking at a stranger
And it is true you've never seen 
This man whose back is strong
With eyes so full of anger that you'll never comprehend
I watch delusion encompass you
As I turn my back to you.

I hear you now behind me, following like a whisper
Cajoling me as my heart pulls free 
And the chains all fall away
And now you scream and now I hear you softly whimper
As lost, you try to find the words
To make me turn again.

You do not know my knees are weak 
But still we keep on walking
My eyes are filled with a coward's tears
But I will not let them flow
And proud, un-bloodied, I walk away not even knowing
If freedom is worth the price I pay
To a heart that loves you so.


©Voo
April 9, 2011

Wednesday, January 23, 2019

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." 


Trudell's poetry and performance developed simultaneously 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.



It Is What It Is
by John Trudell


The All Nite Cafe
by John Trudell
AND
my all time favorite
RAPTOR







Song John wrote for Tina,
so sad, so beautiful......






R.I.P. John
You're with Tina again

❤💖

VOO
Jan 23, 2019

💖

Saturday, January 19, 2019