His prophetic voice calls out "for a fellowship of
spring…where every day shall spawn a God".
Here the shamanic performance rallies against the
corruption and alienation which Marxist styled
Patchen sees everywhere in the mentalities of
materialistic nebulous greed and social conflict.
Faced with this mist of chaos of a diabolical
system he urges the reader "Oh Speak
Out"…"Against the dead trash of their reality".
Here we see the voice of the combative shaman
and of the countercultural activist combine in a
fury of vivid prophecy and revolution. Mythology
and summoning of the ancestors are other
characteristics of the shaman and this is what
Patchen does in, the short poem, “first came the
Lion rider”. Here he summons the Ancestral
“Guardian spirit “of the lion (e.g. “egungun”)
which, he posits kindled the spirit of the reader “a
thing of loveliness and wonder and it had your
name”. In “The Cloth of the Tempest” it is that of
the Tiger‘s spirit “Organ of thunder muttering in
the sky…A Tiger”. Here we are reminded of Blake
and this is accentuated in his reference to a child’s
innocence “The children seek silvery pretty
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