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With short sharp strokes
With short sharp strokes
the swish of ashen blade
of axe is there and the breast, such knob-nipples hardly wrinkles & ripples the fabric over the spare chest
Have always built a cubbyhole world
tapercupboard
from which to spy my Lord while
the glass ever sharpened the speck of bright swirled:
Unlike the freight
train that climbed too steep a grade
Salvation was never clear in sight I never expected to be rescued
by first light.
you reflect
mirroring
a steeple white pure bone into the air
when a bone marrow transplant
fails
& the hook to God is laid bare.
The Poem begins with the throat
The Poem begins with the throat (Pulled to safety on first light)
the note
in it the feeling for the Irishwoman.
I like going down the road with my new orange music book , Kabalevsky’s piano pieces
under my arm
fresh coin in my pocket.
A book on Exuberance.
Fritz Krielser's “ancient Airs & Dances” under her arm
younger sister came home.
Multiple sclerosis, multiple gifts, multi-tasked acts:
multiple faiths
I was tutored in spiritual gratitude from earliest waking axe on.
Into the dark goes the train of my childhood
rusted romance
my twelfth summer hand drawn by a cartographer with palsy.
Lynn Strongin (b. NYC 1939) grew up in
and around New York and in certain parts of
the rural South which made a deep impression
on her. Parents of Eastern European
Jewish ancestors raised her in a rich artistic
environment. Her memoir Indigo is based
largely on these two locales. Chapters of
Indigo have appeared in various venues
such as StorySouth, Atlantic /3711, Verb
Sap, The Square Table, Riverbabble and in Italy’s Storie. “Audubon
Wallpaper,” a chapter which came out first in StorySouth was
nominated for a Pushcart Prize. She will have twelve books out by
mid-2006, among them the anthology The Sorrow Psalms;A Book
of Twentieth Century Elegy to be published by the University of
Iowa Press, June 2006. Her work appears in over thirty anthologies,
seventy journals. In the Sixties, she worked for poet Denise Levertov
in the political environment of Berkeley. Most recently her prose
has appeared in The Dublin Review. For the past twenty-five years
she has made Victoria, British Columbia her home.
Email: Lynn Strongin
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