Persephone, Icarus, The Beatles, Patty Griffin and Gogol Bordello, Mtn Mama perpetuates the myths

This week’s Mountain Mama’s Earth Music perpetuates the myths with music and song. Check out the show by visiting kdrt.org or use this link … and here’s the script!

http://kdrt.org/station/archives/123

1) Magic Carpet Ride, Steppenwolf 4:28
2) Burn The Honeysuckle, The Gourds 3:35
3) She Talks To Angels, The Black Crowes 5:31

Gretel in Darkness
Louise Gluck
This is the world we wanted.
All who would have seen us dead
are dead. I hear the witch’s cry
break in the moonlight through a sheet
of sugar: God rewards.
Her tongue shrivels into gas. . . .

Now, far from women’s arms
and memory of women, in our father’s hut
we sleep, are never hungry.
Why do I not forget?
My father bars the door, bars harm
from this house, and it is years.

No one remembers. Even you, my brother,
summer afternoons you look at me as though
you meant to leave,
as though it never happened.
But I killed for you. I see armed firs,
the spires of that gleaming kiln—

Nights I turn to you to hold me
but you are not there.
Am I alone? Spies
hiss in the stillness, Hansel,
we are there still and it is real, real,
that black forest and the fire in earnest.

4) Song of the Wandering Angeus, Caroline Herring 3:32
5) Dramamine, Modest Mouse, 5:42
6) I Put A Spell on You, Nina Simone 2:38

Landscape With The Fall of Icarus by William Carlos Williams
According to Brueghel
when Icarus fell
it was spring

a farmer was ploughing
his field
the whole pageantry

of the year was
awake tingling
near

the edge of the sea
concerned
with itself

sweating in the sun
that melted
the wings’ wax

unsignificantly
off the coast
there was

a splash quite unnoticed
this was
Icarus drowning

7) Sun King, The Beatles 3:08
8) Wade In The Water, Patty Griffin 3:08
9) Down To the River To Pray, Allison Krauss/Union Station

The Pomegranate by Eavan Boland
The only legend I have ever loved is
the story of a daughter lost in hell.
And found and rescued there.
Love and blackmail are the gist of it.
Ceres and Persephone the names.
And the best thing about the legend is
I can enter it anywhere. And have.
As a child in exile in
a city of fogs and strange consonants,
I read it first and at first I was
an exiled child in the crackling dusk of
the underworld, the stars blighted. Later
I walked out in a summer twilight
searching for my daughter at bed-time.
When she came running I was ready
to make any bargain to keep her.
I carried her back past whitebeams
and wasps and honey-scented buddleias.
But I was Ceres then and I knew
winter was in store for every leaf
on every tree on that road.
Was inescapable for each one we passed.
And for me.
It is winter
and the stars are hidden.
I climb the stairs and stand where I can see
my child asleep beside her teen magazines,
her can of Coke, her plate of uncut fruit.
The pomegranate! How did I forget it?
She could have come home and been safe
and ended the story and all
our heart-broken searching but she reached
out a hand and plucked a pomegranate.
She put out her hand and pulled down
the French sound for apple and
the noise of stone and the proof
that even in the place of death,
at the heart of legend, in the midst
of rocks full of unshed tears
ready to be diamonds by the time
the story was told, a child can be
hungry. I could warn her. There is still a chance.
The rain is cold. The road is flint-coloured.
The suburb has cars and cable television.
The veiled stars are above ground.
It is another world. But what else
can a mother give her daughter but such
beautiful rifts in time?
If I defer the grief I will diminish the gift.
The legend will be hers as well as mine.
She will enter it. As I have.
She will wake up. She will hold
the papery flushed skin in her hand.
And to her lips. I will say nothing.

10) Jesus Christ Was An Only Child, Sun Kil Moon 2:00
11) Cars, Trucks and Motorbikes, Little Country Giants 3:53

“I have been a stranger in a strange land”
by Rita Dove
Life’s spell is so exquisite, everything conspires to break it.
Emily Dickinson
It wasn’t bliss. What was bliss
but the ordinary life? She’d spend hours
in patter, moving through whole days
touching, sniffing, tasting . . . exquisite
housekeeping in a charmed world.
And yet there was always

more of the same, all that happiness,
the aimless Being There.
So she wandered for a while, bush to arbor,
lingered to look through a pond’s restive mirror.
He was off cataloging the universe, probably,
pretending he could organize
what was clearly someone else’s chaos.

That’s when she found the tree,
the dark, crabbed branches
bearing up such speechless bounty,
she knew without being told
this was forbidden. It wasn’t
a question of ownership—
who could lay claim to
such maddening perfection?

And there was no voice in her head,
no whispered intelligence lurking
in the leaves—just an ache that grew
until she knew she’d already lost everything
except desire, the red heft of it
warming her outstretched palm.

12) Magic, Cobie Caillat 3:24
13) Arial Ramirez, Richard Buckner 2:18

Mythology
by Marilyn Hacker
Penelope as a garçon manqué
weaves sonnets on a barstool among sailors,
tapping her iambs out on the brass rail. Ours
is not the high-school text. Persephone
a.k.a. Télémaque-who-tagged-along,
sleeps off her lunch on an Italian train
headed for Paris, while Ulysse-Maman
plugs into the Shirelles singing her song
(“What Does a Girl Do?”). What does a girl do
but walk across the world, her kid in tow,
stopping at stations on the way, with friends
to tie her to the mast when she gets too
close to the edge? And when the voyage ends,
what does a girl do? Girl, that’s up to you.

1) Start Wearing Purple, Gogol Bordello 3:43

Mountain Mama’s Earth Music is heard here on KDRT 95.7 FM, in Davis, CA and you can check out today’s play list, listen to the show or any of other great shows any old time by logging onto KDRT.org.
Thanks for listening in to this show about myths

Peace
14) Mists Down Below, The Duhks 4:24