Postings from Amy’s own delightful and unique Goddess Thoughts, including charming selections from her hundreds of appealing and inspiring poems published in her large book of the same name, along with short-story accounts of many of her delightful and hilariously fantastical relationships, run-ins, and the remarkably humorous reactions of her own, as well as her muse-like critical “Editor” of Amy Dio’s tales and conversations with her personal world of ancient (and often not so old) gods and goddesses, angels and fairies, of mythology and fantasy and how to this day we are influenced by the “reality” of a wonder-filled world of magic, mystery, and memories from the pantheons of the gods and goddesses from the days of yore.
Amy Dio in her garden with Aphrodite
Amy Indira Dio Ramdass is a mythology/goddess poet and an author of mystery/romance novels, including not only her big beautiful book of “Goddess Thoughts”, but also her delightfully enchanting, but chillingly sinister, debut novel “River Bound Secret Swept”, a magical yet mysterious tome of a story, full of romance and intrigue, set in the tropical beauty of her own native Guyana, and on to Houston, Texas, and her own adopted Toronto, Ontario, Canada. She is working on her second novel, draft titled “Avatara”
Previously Published by Amy I. Ramdass. . .
Amy is a highly respected and well-followed expert on the ancient deities and pantheons of Greek and Roman philosophy and mythology.
The End of the Trail, sculpture by James Earle Fraser (1894) The year of Albert’s birth
Note~ This poem has been modified from an original poem, “Lonesome Land”, by my uncle Albert Pendergraft (1894–1944). See the brief commentary on Albert’s life and the original composition following the poem. (Rewritten, revised, expanded and edited by Lloyd Albert Williams.)
Dedicated to Albert and his Lonesome Land with love and hope . . .
You’re a Lonesome Land a virgin land Beautifully exposed free and bare You’re an untamed still wild Lonesome Land But a proud land demanding yet fair
When I pause on some sun-blistered hill And gaze far o’er your broad boundless range Where the brisk restless winds never still And swift sunlight and cloud shadows change
There’s a song in my heart and an ache A longing indefinitely sad With contentment that sorrow can’t take And my troubles seem gone and I’m glad
In the night while the hours slowly pass When the wolves wail their long lonely cry And the wind whispers low in the grass As the stars circle silently by
Your feminine spirit holds me fast In a spell that cannot be undone While the days of my lifetime shall last You have blessed me and made me your son
Then softly to me drifts your sweet voice When I’m so weary and far away Faintly I hear you and I rejoice For you are calling me home to stay
More often now I hear your calm call While I so long but sated do roam And my eyes fill with tears that might fall Were it not that you’re calling me home
Your voice promises comfort and peace When I rest on your nurturing breast Then all my cares and sorrows shall cease And my somnolent soul shall find rest
Give me strength till my battles are won While along life’s lonely trails I plod Then at last when my journey is done Let me sleep for all time ‘neath your sod
Let my spirit roam free in your hills And keep watch as the ages pass by Till the clamor of humankind stills When mere men and their follies shall die
Till the heavens and earth have grown old And the endless dark night has drawn on When the sun in your path has grown cold And the days of creation are gone
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(The original 1944 poem has been privately retained for posterity)
About Albert and the original poem:
Albert Pendergraft was one of my several uncles, and I was given his given name as my middle name, but I remember meeting him only once, when I was just two or three years old on the main street of Worland, Wyoming. I remember he gave my older brother and me each a silver dollar and he bought us a wagon to share.
At the time he was a ditch rider for some of Wyoming’s Big Horn River basin counties. Albert committed suicide in 1944, leaving behind a poem he called “Lonesome Land”, presumably as a self-penned epitaph, although it was written in more of a lyrical ballad kind of song-writing, repeating the title “Lonesome Land” every other line in each verse. A ditch rider’s life is a lonely life, so the original poem, or ballad, may have been generated over time by singing it along the trails he rode, which, if so, made it a much simpler poem than this recent rewritten revision, although the meaning of the original poem and a few phrases of the more memorable lines have not been changed, but all of the stanzas have been altered for length, meter and the rhyming scheme, including four new stanzas that I have added. ~llaw
