Tag Archives: Connections

DANCING THE DREAMING

DANCING THE DREAMING

Aborigines on an Austin stage
Dancing the dreaming

But something’s wrong

They dance in stage lines not sacred circles
Men and women dancing together
Even I know that’s not how they did it

My Aussie friend points out that they have
no scars of initiation

Drug store cowboys
in five and dime dream time

The phoniness bothers me for quite a while
They are not really doing the sacred songs
They probably don’t even know the sacred songs

Of course if they did they wouldn’t be singing
them for us

On a Texas stage
in five and dime dream time

And yet there is something happening
below the surface
that starts to pull me in

The didgeree-do is made from a real tree
The circular breathing to blow it is there
strong and free

Something real is rising through it all
Something I don’t understand
Something they don’t even understand

If you listen real close you can hear it
below and through and beyond it all

Fifty thousand years of DNA singing

SUNDAY AFTERNOON

SUNDAY AFTERNOON

It was a Sunday afternoon about a year ago today
I couldn’t sit, I couldn’t stand I just knew I couldn’t stay

So I took off for Toronto fifteen hundred miles away

Two days of boring meetings,
couldn’t stand to have one more
didn’t know where I needed to be
but it wasn’t here I knew for sure

So I grabbed a train to Windsor
and Detroit which lies next door

Outside spring was springing and calling more and more
and I’d get to see some country that I’d never seen before

Oh, the sheep were soft upon the land
and there was magic in the day
as I sipped my rum and cola
and rhymed couplets all the way

Checked in on Wednesday, wondering what to do
maybe I could try to call a good old friend or two

There was a man I’d met in Banff
just three weeks before
a man of love and wisdom
that I’d like to see once more

And a lady of my poems
that I’d seen just twice before
thirty minutes in an airport
and two hours on the shore

He was busy in a meeting she answered on first try
she had booked off work without knowing why

And when I told her that I was in her town
she said “I’ve got a story and I’ll be right down”

It seems that her grand dad
who had raised her as a child
had died not long ago
and the grief had drove her wild

The family all were fighting for the pennies on his eyes
and there was no one there to hear her heartfelt cries

So she ran from that hospital not knowing what to do
and stood on the highest hill alone in a sky of blue

And loudly called my name
“Please come, please, I need you”

When I asked had she made this cry
and had I come real soon

“Oh it wasn’t very long ago
just Sunday afternoon”