A Sumari poem by Jane Roberts

Listen to Thought-Bird Song (11:08)

This poem was originally published in Adventures in Consciousness by Jane Roberts. In her notes regarding her translation from Sumari to English she had this to say:

“You might have noticed how much longer the third verse of Thought-Bird Song is than the original Sumari. I don’t know how such a long stanza came out of a shorter one, but I do know that the Sumari did contain the ‘extra’ meaning. Each verse is actually like a Rosetta Stone though, because each Sumari stanza has meanings on various levels. Several layers of meaning are nested one within the other, so that actually the same Sumari words would have to be translated two or three times, to get one ‘full’ song or poem. I think that more ancient songs still lie buried in Thought-Bird Song and many others, waiting till I translate them.”

Reprinted with kind permission of SethNet Publishing

Program Notes

The Sumari development occurred during session #598, November 23, 1971 during a now famous ESP class held in Jane Roberts’s and husband Rob Butts’s Water Street apartment in Elmira, NY. Jane slipped into an altered state that night and uttered the words, “Sumari—Ispania—Wena—Nefarie … Dena—Dena—Nefarie, Lona, Lona, Lona, Sumari!”

There were thirteen people present, including long time friend Sue Watkins who described the encounter in detail in her book, Conversations with Seth, The Story of Jane Roberts’s ESP Class, Vol. 1.

Jane, an accomplished writer, poet, and psychic, experienced a renewed burst of creativity from this event. She describes her own feelings in her brilliant book Adventures in Consciousness:

“In a matter of weeks, Sumari gave me an entirely different kind of poetry. For about three years I’d been working on nonfiction and my poetry had suffered. I seemed to have reached a plateau. As I sat watching the oak tree, I could feel my awareness expand into ever widening and deepening levels. In that state one day, Sumari words suddenly came into my head in a different way. I ‘knew’ that these were Sumari verses, ancient poetry that carried truths long forgotten by our race. Two levels of consciousness were involved; one, in which I picked up the Sumari, and the other in which the translations came. As a rule I couldn’t get the English translation without the Sumari, even though I tried.

“In poetry the Sumari songs, sung or written, delineate the metaphysics of the inner self. And that metaphysics is, I believe, truer to reality than the exterior dogmas and sciences that we accept as ‘truth’.”

I must admit I was blown away when I read about the Sumari development back in the late 1970’s, having read several of Jane’s Seth books by that time. It seemed to me like an entire new reality was unfolding right before my eyes. And the poems felt familiar to me. The language also seemed distantly familiar, like some hybrid Latin/Eastern European dialect.

I was in graduate school at Temple University in Philadelphia studying music composition in the Fall of 1978. After spinning my wheels for several months searching for inspiration for a new piece, I decided to set Jane’s poem — Thought-Bird Song — to music. The result was an eleven minute chamber piece for Soprano, piano, mallet percussion, and synthesizer. It turned out to be my favorite work from that period.

The arrangement begins and ends softly, with tiny bell-like sounds emphasizing the thought-bird aspects of Jane’s poem. Thought-birds are a metaphor for the way in which we literally create ourselves and the world around us. They are also symbolic of the fact that we use inner, though invisible to the physical senses, aspects of our own psyche to create as well.

The score features several motifs that weave their way through a soundscape that includes strange scales, exotic harmonies, and unconventional text settings — all to portray an other-worldly presence, the Sumari, magically manifesting from deep within. So sit back, relax, and enjoy…

Listen to Thought-Bird Song (11:08)

© 1978 Paul M. Helfrich, All Rights Reserved.