Griot (For Rudy) Poem by Vince Rogers

It is a heavy burden, the power to read the bones

Few others share this solemn gift

So you carry the burden alone

The ancestors placed upon you, this weighty charge to keep

To faithfully guard the sacred scrolls

In loss of precious sleep

The apocryphal confuses the seminal

The didactic supplants the sublime

All dogma must be chastened, to illuminate the rites of the lines

And so to revive the canon, to Jerusalem land you retreat

You seek the comfort of old Virginia plain

While wrestling ignorance to its ultimate defeat