Jack & Billie Shields

___________friends and family, music, gardening, hiking, dancing, reading, poetry,living life______________________________________ ..JACK & BILLIE 'STORE YOUR TREASURES' AT GATHERING OF THE HOMINIDS________________________________________ ________________________________________________ JACK--"DIDGERIDOO DREAM" SPOKEN WORD AT GATHERING OF THE HOMINIDS __________________________________________________ THIS BEAST _________________This beast you see can be seized by a song/ with eyes for shooting stars or clouds drifting by the moon/ every mothers fruit of the womb born to fall and be consumed / animal of meat mind minerals, beast of breastbone morrow sorrow/ breathes moist air, waters dust with salt-seas-cells-long-memories/ you same as me, dust and dew grave grasses or ashes on the sea./_______________________________________________Green grain grass overgrows graves and ash and bones and bones older still/ hills of fossils covered clover like/ clouds, shrouds, mists, myths blown away, waves wind is motion is mystery / mountains tumble tranquil trees tremble twisted roots wrapped round wrinkled rock / and bones and groin-seed served up to the sun and long ago undone/ will feed sons and daughters, who in their turn of earth and ash / offer up the roots and worm the blessed earth eats / green, grain grass waves over graves./ ________________________________________________________Bone s buried with grave gear covered with pollen of flowers / picked thousands of years gone by/ among the oldest bones known / bones of old people, elders someone else to hunt and forage for them / crippled in youth or born with birth defects/ yet cared for into old age,/_____________________________________________________fr om the thousands and thousands and one nights of tales and ceremony / for man, mammal, survival of the fittest means something different. / ___________________________________________________________ Survival of the fittest means something else something other for us / in homes of mammoth tusks covered in hides / of rock outcroppings and shallow caves yawning dark mouth, long rock overhang / just deep enough to make a home for fire-making hominids / or out in the day in the tens of thousands of years / in the nights, the stories and stars the tools of daily life turn on art / sitting round, dancing round fire wearing the masks and antlers. / ________________________________________________________ Men in the cool damp dark miles deep womb of the mother mountain / drinking from the fountain wellspring of waking dream / down, down, deep along miles of dark entrails / to the black belly of the earth womb of rebirth to manhood / drumming on stalactites, stalagmites and ribbons of calcite / pictures of beasts and trancing shamans dancing on walls torch-lit, shadowy, alive / man animal emissary, born of both worlds the feathered mask / bird face, bird staff, cock stiff the urge down, down underground / the soulsurge between twin worlds sliding / crawling out of the birth canal back among moon and sun. / ________________________________________________________ Home hearth Earth Madonna's in circled stone altars feet stuck direct in dirt / ground of being / Home hearth where woman's magic birthed and blessed the tribe / where everyone is recognized / Mitochondrial Eve mating in the dizzying dawn long gone / when three races of hominids shared the garden / and the serpent's bride joyously picked the fruits of the tree./ ___________________________________________________________ Man a million years living cold in the dark / naked no tools animal hearted love / stone hand ax, chipped flint / Sparks fly, Flaming mind, Fire in the Snow! / The hunt begins at birth, The gathering all within./ _______________________________________________________ Survival of the fittest means something else Something other for us./ We are the acrobats that can raise our own reality Create the creature we become _______________________________________________________