Spell Casting Through Ritual

A Poetry Mixtape Edited by Raoul Fernandes

Raoul's Liner Notes

In our modern times, it’s fascinating to see where we still hold rituals in our lives, even in small quiet ways such as preparing morning coffee, unbraiding the hair of the one you love, or reading to our children. Sometimes they are performed without even realizing they are rituals—perhaps because they are essential to who we are as human beings. A repeated ritual is like a single beat that forms a rhythm in the long song of yourself. In a chaotic and unpredictable world, this can be both grounding and awakening.

Religious and spiritual rituals work to strengthen the bonds we have with our ancestors, each other, and of course, the divine. Bringing these rituals into a contemporary world can be tricky, even humorous. When the speaker in Molly Cross-Blanchard’s “First Time Smudge” realizes too late that she has Jimmy Eats World on her stereo, or when Kaveh Akbar recalls praying with his brother and his brother’s foot accidentally “brooongs” a coiled doorstop, and they erupt into laughter. Somehow even these “sloppy postures of praise” still fold into a kind of holiness.

Rituals do what a lot of poetry does: they help one form a relationship with mystery. As much as we are drawn to facts and reason, we also seem to need to reach beyond them, sometimes even as a matter of life and death. Feel the urgency in Cassandra Myers’s poem “Lake Baptiste Ungenders Me” as the speaker “re-brown[s] at the water’s touch”, or how the speaker in Anna Belle Kaufman’s “Cold Solace” eats a frozen piece of honeycake made by her dead mom and tastes the important message that her mother left her.

Of course, much of this does happen with other kinds of poems, not just ones that are about ritual, as many of these are. The poem itself can be used as a ritual object, something to cast a spell, to open a channel to the unknown. I included a couple of “incantation poems” that explicitly do this. One of them, Erin Robinsong’s “Late Prayer”, for instance, asks that we “feel the very large intimacy / And may it assist us” I hope as you read these poems you feel this intimacy even for a moment-–a beat-–in your day.

Raoul Fernandes

Raoul Fernandes lives with his wife and two sons on the traditional territories of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh Nations (Vancouver, BC…

Poem readings

The Poems

Bob Hicok

Love poem

The woman I love

braids her hair. She’s Eve

and Eve means breathe, to give life,

my wife, from Eva by way

of the Hebrew havah. At dusk

I unlock her hair

Anna Belle Kaufman

Cold Solace

When my mother died,

one of her honey cakes remained in the freezer.

I couldn’t bear to see it vanish,

so it waited, pardoned,

in its ice cave behind the metal trays

for two more years.

Cassandra Myers

Lake Baptiste Ungenders Me

upon contact / head first / baptismal

the rind of me / peels into ribbons

of foam / and pearls / i re-brown at the water’s

touch / its two-way mudmirror / hands me

its own name / earthliquid / bottomless

Erin Robinsong

Late Prayer

May our weapons be effective feminine inventions that like life.

May we blow up like weeds, and be medicinal and everywhere.

May the disturbed ground be our pharmacy. May the exhausted

Raymond Antrobus

Happy Birthday Moon

Dad reads aloud. I follow his finger across the page.

Sometimes his finger moves past words, tracing white space.

He makes the Moon say something new every night

to his deaf son who slurs his speech.

Ron Padgett

Prose Poem (“The morning coffee.”)

The morning coffee. I’m not sure why I drink it. Maybe it’s the ritual

of the cup, the spoon, the hot water, the milk, and the little heap of

brown grit, the way they come together to form a nail I can hang the

Mohja Kahf

My Grandmother Washes Her Feet in the Sink of the Bathroom at Sears

My grandmother puts her feet in the sink

of the bathroom at Sears

to wash them in the ritual washing for prayer,

wudu,

Molly CROSS-BLANCHARD

First Time Smudge

It takes eight matches, a burnt thumb, and a quick Google search

to light the sweetgrass braid Mom scored for me from an elder

at work. Always use matches, she said. Spirit likes matches.

Brenda Hillman

Equinox Ritual with Ravens & Pines

— so we said to the somewhat: Be born —

& the shadow kept arriving in segments,

cold currents pushed minerals

Alexis Pauline Gumbs

another set of instructions

we are asking you to trust your hands. put them on your heart. trust

your heart. hear what we are saying. trust what you hear. we are

asking you to build a circle. always a circle. not almost a circle. face

Kaveh Akbar

How Prayer Works

Tucked away in our tiny bedroom so near each other

the edge of my prayer rug covered the edge of his, my

brother and I prayed. We were 18 and 11 maybe, or 19

and 12. He was back from college where he built his own

J-Card (PDF)

PIV-Liner_SpellCasting.pdf

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