The Chronicles of the Pharaoh’S Daughter: Poems of Love, Loss, and Rebirth

By Davina Rhine

The Chronicles of the Pharaohs Daughter presents a passionate, ironic, and symbolic collection of poems that blends antiquity, history, memory, reincarnation, wealth, poverty, sex, love, life, birth, and afterlife. Poet Davina Rhine shares a tormented adventure lamenting the loss of her idealized father and recalling the grudging acceptance of a womans experience in domesticity, mundane work, and child-rearing.

This confessional poet, torn by grief, erotica, responsibility, mature love, and dreams, goes from sinner to forgiver in the course of the collection. Unlike other confessionals, her journey in dreams and everyday life does not end in misery, but in rapture both strong and defiant as she is resurrected. The clashing metaphors of the past and present take us all over the ancient world and into the heart of modern love; the journey begins with an act of vengeance for the women raped at the birth of Rome.

Rhine explores the sacred, the vulgar, and the human experience as her poems explode into sharp, dizzying shards of emotion and drama. The Chronicles of the Pharaohs Daughter is a collection that exhales classical archaeology while reinventing the past with the vigor and vision of a strong, defiant activist and writer.

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Aug 14, 2012
• ISBN: 9781475928181

Davina Rhine

Davina Rhine is a socially aware political activist who lives in Texas with her family. Her first book, Rebel Moms: The Off -Road Map for the Off -Road Mom, was published in 2011, which has received great reviews from BUST Magazine & Hip Mama Zine. She spends her days chasing the goddess and dharma and writing essays, fiction and poetry.

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Copyright © 2012 by Davina Rhine.

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ISBN: 978-1-4759-2817-4 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4759-2819-8 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-4759-2818-1 (ebk)

iUniverse rev. date: 07/31/2012

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Rebellion Press logo designed by Juan Leon of Firelion Graphix.

This edition published by arrangement with Rebellion Press.

Contents

The Pharaoh

The Holy War

Take the Sword to Your Belly

Caligula

Where is my Abram?

My Athena

I am but a Pharaoh’s Daughter

My Nike

The Second Coming

Our Fallen Empire

The Last Rites

The King

Death Before Dishonor

My Five Bloodstains

The King and Me . . . Tragedy

Daddy, When Are You Comin’ Home?

Addiction: The Pain of Angels . . .

Genealogy and Gynecology

The Possession

Date Rape and the Ashipu

My Green Chair

Dancing Skeletons

The Roller Girls

A Dream within a Dream: Erotica, Violence, and Fear.

What Happened to the High Rise?

Self-Centered Selfish

The Animal Instinct

The Sinners

Sex, Science, and Aging Budgets

Where Does Green Leave Us?

Hell’s Kitchen . . .

The Forbidden Lovers Door . . . An Intimate Civil War.

For Troy, My Heart Sails . . .

The Chains of Cleopatra and the Snakes of Separation

The Girl in Blue Jeans Clinging to a Cross . . .

The Magnolia Trees at Midnight

Not Once, Not Ever

The Church

The Pearl Affair

Ball and Chain

You Know

The Garden of the Gods

The Capricorns and the Cancers

Burn the House Down If You Must

I Don’t

Cinderella and her Pumpkin Man

The Backyard Amazon

Innocence

What happened to the Cancers? Finding the Aristocrat in me.

Repentance

Crayons Spilling on the Floor

Aves Love

The Lovers

Starvation and Salvation

Fated Muse

The Yellow Gold

Cryptic Lipstick—I Love You

The Human Heart

One Thousand Nights

Lovesick in the Bottom of a Glass

Love in Pompeii

The Angels Have Come Knockin’

The Queen

We All Walk the Path Again

The Goddess’s Table

Medusa: The Legacy of the Crown

Evicting Cyril

The Great Goddess Temple: The Beginning and the End, the Future and the Past.

The Modern Athena

For Daddy

And His Torturers

Both Genealogical

And Institutional

For His Birthed Victims

And For Vietnam

And All Its Undoing

And Wrong.

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This collection, The Chronicles of the Pharaoh’s Daughter, is best enjoyed with a heavy, dense red wine preferably with hints of walnut, espresso, dark chocolate and cherry. You will want to occupy a barren room lit with candles perfuming the air with hints of frankincense, lavender, sage, and vanilla. You will want to fill the space with the musical heart-cries of Sinead O’ Connor, Tracy Chapman, Morrissey and the like. You will need room to scream, cry, crumble, and wail and to be resurrected. That is how I lived and worked for several years while mourning my father, my marriage, and the loss of my youth that was impeded by my upcoming middle-age. The Chronicles are a passionate, ironic, and symbolic collection that blends antiquity, history, memory, reincarnation, wealth, poverty, sex, love, life, birth and afterlife. It captures a periled time in my life where my soul was encapsulated into the outer realm of unconscious living. I was a ghost doing my job and chores. These poems were drafted between the ages of twenty-seven and thirty-years-old. I was living in reincarnation over-and-over, torn between heaven and hell. The child who lost the romanticized dream of her father to his death and their broken reality, the daydreamer lover who wondered in the wilderness of temptation for far too long, to come home feeling both betrayed and the being the betrayer, and to finally emerge both revenged and avenged, but redeemed in her little family unit of three; my little family that serves as the church, the bath, the fire, the light, the way, to me.

These poems dance where I danced, and fell where I had fallen, and then got up on their own, finally, just like me. During these surreal years flavored by wine and records, there were many friends trying to help me find the way again, as a daughter mourned her father, and a woman mourned love. In retrospect, though painful, this was a very lyrical, dreamy time in my life—robust with meaning, but nonetheless fragile and perhaps decadent. How I managed to keep my micro-managed job at the time, and keep some sense of sensibility and routine going for my son, I don’t know. My nighttime hours were filled with Elvis records, candles, mythology, and a spouse trying to hold me and understand my poetic regression—even while we were both living imprisoned in different and numerous ways.

What you will find in this collection is less political, or idealistic, like my younger pre-twenty-five-years-old work/self but it is more gnawing, primitive, and raw. I am an eloquent primate with a burning passion that frequently gets me into trouble in the ‘real’ world of rules and micromanagement, and cloaked, wealthy indecency that pours hot from those on top of the jungle. I am a lion who roars—even when she tries to keep her mouth closed, so that her den is safe. What I emerged with after wandering through the Garden of Eden, was a profound love of archaeology, an inner-strength redefined, and an eclipsed longing for living and loving while struggling for a just world. Serene Chaos may be my wet nurse, but the hope for a new Amazon generation is my goddess muse and my calling.

In love, uprising, and for being human,

Davina Rhine

The Pharaoh

The Holy War

Take the Sword to Your Belly

How can you expect your daughter,

to give her life in your death?

Will your grave be so selfish and cruel?

The father whose name fails to love me

Even now as skeletons dance behind me

Waving flagrantly with their mockery

Our chains of marriage bind me

You beg me to take the sword to my belly

Why do you beckon me to die to be with you?

Can you not at least this once

meet with me in life?

Your spirit doesn’t know me,

your soul fails me

It is your memory that taunts me

You won’t even hold me in death

Big girls don’t cry

unless daddy ignores their existence

"Take the sword to your belly darling daughter

And maybe, just maybe, with the ultimate sacrifice

I will invite you into my dwelling . . ."

My weeping denies my son, your forsaken grandson

Your seed so shallow . . . should it be allowed to carry on?

My sorrow hangs around my neck

like ancient perfumed beads

Suddenly the gods’ hands tighten around me

Bathed in your blood

I hold your heart in my hands

O’ Daddy,

Your