You Are Here to Receive This Prophecy

Another Qarrtsiluni find.
I'm feeling not that happy the last couple of weeks.
In that case (sometimes) nostalgia might be a cure, for me.

I stumbled upon "You Are Here to Receive This Prophecy" by Hannah Stephenson.
Hannah wrote the poem for Qarrtsiluni (podcast 28/11/2011)

You Are Here to Receive This Prophecy
You are here to receive this prophecy,
I am so certain of this I would wager life on it.
Get open, fast. Get to the highest point
available, that hill, for example. Even better,
the tree on top of the hill. Clamber up,
go on. Do what the branches do, reach up,
tilt your face to the clouds. Now you wait.
Prepare to hear. You never know what the voice
will sound like, perhaps not a voice. Maybe
like a current of electricity sizzling, sparking,
or the snap of knuckles cracking. A slide whistle
or kazoo—don’t laugh, it could happen.

How would that look, God talking to you,
you laughing it up in a tree on a hilltop.
Be a lightning rod, an antenna. Reception
can be active, you know. Think of a dancer
being lifted, all her muscles tightening
around her bones. She is lighter for how she
lifts herself, gets smaller, more powerful.
Call the message to you, show you can
be trusted to hear and hold it. Don’t even think
of coming down from there, you just wait.
You stay up in that tree, listening. The words
will come to you, they will, they will.

Hannah Stephenson is a poet, editor, instructor, and singer-songwriter based in Columbus, Ohio. Her writing has been featured (or is forthcoming) in various online and print publications, including the Huffington Post, The Nervous Breakdown, MAYDAY, Stymie, and Escape into Life. For more of her work, visit her daily poetry site, The Storialist, at thestorialist.com. (It says on Qarrtsiluni)

For me, the videopoem had to have a seventies-summer-childhood-anything-is-possible-nostalgia-feel...
I wanted to say thanks to my father and mother who gave me good childhood...

But I also wanted to recycle.
Recently I had an interesting talk about recycling parts of ones own creations.
Writers can use the same words, phrases even...

so why not try to create a new videopoem with exisiting and used material
(exept for the poem, I hadn't used that before)
The music is a remix of a very short track I made for a commissioned one minute-film.

The images I shot myself (from a train, through the trees, into the sun) were also the base for this videopoem (although for that one I abstracted those images, but the basis is the same)

The footage of the boy trying to climb the fence (thanks to an old family-film of the Harris Family from 1975) comes from the same youtube-video I used imaged from for this videopoem.

The blips and cuts from the sculpted head (of my father) and the hands holding it (my mother's) were also used in this videopoem.

So, I think I was able to create a new videopoem (thanks to a poem and a reading I hadn't used before, I do realise that) with bricks and mortar that I used elsewhere before.

You Are Here to Receive This Prophecy


Words & Voice: Hannah Stephenson
Concept, camera, editing treats & music: Swoon
Thanks: Qarrtsiluni, Harris Family, my father and mother