3 Poems by Frank R. Chappell

3 Poems

by Frank R. Chappell

Abbe Breuil in Lascaux caves at La Mouthe Wellcome

I have always believed that poetry is consciousness creating. It provides a context of expression for the drama of our experience in a more ultimate sense, a more meaningful sense. In this way, it is akin to a religion. Faith, doubt, hope, despair, analysis of culture-bound institutions, the sublimation of internal desires, and the meaning found in all of it that catalyzes wisdom has always been most valuable to me and I have tried to convey those times of awe, wonder and interconnectedness in my experience through my writing.

Give Me that Old Time Religion came from my fascination with the anthropology of ancient religious practices and the recreation of what human beings were doing when they engaged in ritual artwork in the late Pleistocene. The seeds of our cognitive development as a species lies in the production of cave art, ritual spaces, and the projection of our natures onto the world. We interpret the environment to be “saying something” to us as we make meaning; we became human as we saw humanity in all things and found the divine in our relationship to the natural world and each other.

A Nondualism arose from a sort of meditative state on the dichotomies we find as we look into the daily operations of the world, morality, and our separation from nature and each other. We are united to each other and the cosmos on a sub-atomic level that seemingly negates all of these oppositions we perceive in reality, and yet we do not realize that it is only our perspectives that divide us. The gray areas matter; common ground matters; and our construction of reality through binaries inhibits our growth, I believe.

Death Poem was written in a kind of synesthetic revelry, and I hope this shows. It offers a kind of childish intellectualization in the consideration of my own death and the trite consolations masking relief that I always think some are too afraid to admit occurring. The black dog is, for me, an image of tragic impairment—I did own a beautiful black with three legs who inspired this—and it implies a sense of pernicious regret at never achieving what one hopes to become.

- Frank R. Chappell

Give Me That Old-Time Religion


In the darkest caves, where painted men,
waking from their ethereal treks,
added color by firelight to
jagged outcroppings of
the longest stalactites,
where burgeoning brains,
exploding on sediment,
accumulated and fastened,
like the walls of Valhalla
where we crowded, and,
in awestruck wonder,
saw this same sediment
speak of horses, seals, and
horned beings, the world
revealing itself
secretly, slowly, quietly
in silicon and water, and we,
like babies, suckling on the
love of Revelation, we
discovered the inner workings
of an animated reality
and belonged to it entirely.



A Nondualism


It’s funny to think that

                there is a sweet-smelling earth:
                                black and rich, moist and soft,
                                smooth and cool to grasp,
                                and it falls through your fingers
                                like dark stars

                then there is foul-smelling earth:
                                reeking with detritus,
                                discarded eggshells and last nights’ bones
                                its ramparts, built with our dead,
                                are proof we were here
                                above this subterranean kingdom

and both are the genesis of much fruit.



Death Poem


I can break my own heart if I thought hard enough
of all of them standing over me.
“Frankie, Frankie,” they say.

Frankie, Frankie, I hear
and the sweet, melodious background vibrations
subsumed by the arbitrary consonants and vowels
sewn together like limbs on some ragged, mud-soaked
faceless doll in the jaws of that black dog we had
with three legs comes whispering along with them.

They are the words under the words buried in
the earth of meaning slinging from that whitewashed visage
as it is run through the air at three-legged-dog-speeds.

I don’t think I’ll ever escape choking up at their words
with regret for the joy they must feel, that—now being dead—

they do not need to say more to me.

Frank R. Chappell grew up in Mammoth, PA. He holds a Master’s Degree in Anthropology and is a doctoral student in the Department of Religion at Temple University. He has conducted ethnographic research in Phnom Penh, Cambodia and Bali, Indonesia on both Buddhist ordination and secondary mortuary practices among Bali-Hindus. His current research investigates contemporary Hindu discourses and the negotiation of Hindu identity in the United States. His work has appeared in Religions of South Asia, Chennai Journal of Intercultural Philosophy, and the Journal of Indian Philosophy and Religion. He is also currently a Religious Affairs Airman at the 171st Air Refueling Wing in Coraopolis, PA. He published his first short work of poetry, An Atheist Who Prays, at the age of seventeen. In 2016, he published a longer volume, Wild Soil, which is available on Amazon.