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CAUGHT IN THE NET 189 - POETRY BY
LYNN STRONGIN
Series Editor - Jim Bennett for The Poetry Kit -
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Darling darling this is a steeplechase
Around us life becomes surreal: a china plate is steel
Its reflections a cross between spiritual & industrial.
Evangelical comes the rain: cold, hard, winter rain
Like nails pressing the whole image
Down
Down
Down
Home has become a minefield:
from Though you slept by Lynn Strongin |
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CONTENTS
1 - BIOGRAPHY
2 – POETRY
Epiphany - a poetry cycle |
3 - PUBLISHING HISTORY
4 - AFTERWORD
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1 – BIOGRAPHY: Lynn Strongin
Lynn Strongin was born during the last of the dirty thirties. Raised in various states during the war, when her father, a psychologist, was stationed everywhere but abroad. She survived three traumas during the first twelve years of her life. World War Two affected her deeply since, a Jewish child, she was aware The Holocaust was directed against the Jewish race. Her parents divorced at age nine, when the ground in Europe was still smoking. At age twelve, she contracted polio, a year or so before the Salk and Sabin vaccine came in. Paralyzed from the waist down, it was the third dark time in which she learned song would be her salivation.
Author of fourteen books, she has received a National Endowment for the Arts award, two PEN awards (Poets, Essayists & Noveletis) and several years ago was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize in literature. A Pacifist, she has fought for women’s rights, rights of the disabled, and against America’s involvement in Southeast Assia.. Marches against the United States brutalities in Southeast Asia saw her presence. Her mentors have been Denise Levertov, Robert Duncan and the Black Mountain School, and Kay Boyle.
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2 - POETRY
EPIPHANY
“O my Poor People” (Winstone Churchill, WW II, on rationing)
For
Helen Macdonald, her barony the fiefdom of wild things most of all the hawk
“spooky pale-eyed ghosts” for Helen who was drawn to this “feathered shotgun”
who studied, in Sun Valley, Idaho, the archives of falconry Bereavement and
raptor come from the same root: to rob Helen Macdonald
'Forgiveness is the fragrance that the violet sheds on the heel that has
crushed—Mark Twain
(c)Lynn Strongin
2020
WHEN THERE WAS STILL A WORLD
I walked past transparent brick linen mills
Past boys & girls eyes as dark as thunder
Ir clear7 as mountain lakes
I clutched a sone to my chest
Felt my racing heart race faster as home drew near, more dear to me was my
kittle sister’
S face pressed to the glass all afternoon.
Sky boded snow
Was was freshly over
When I had moxie
I looked down to my small muscular legs when they had power. Energy a small flag
unfurled: I walked the train along the old tracks:
when there was still a world.
magnificent night
shots of a jumbo jet crossing the face of the moon, wreathed in vapour trails;
wide-angled pictures from the very pinnacle of the Millennium Dome; montages of
Heathrow air traffic with planes blotting the sky.from Obituary for
AlisdairMcDonald, journalist photographer
SEARCHING FOR THE PROMISED LAND we’d ride the sky
A London photojournalist capturing the damage of a storm in the residential
district of Battersea, he fell flat to the pavement, his camera going off at
random. The final frame: “Blurred, taken from a low angle, (obituary. . .)
No needle-pusher
A heart that’s heavy as a suitcase
And a piece of stale bread on the kitchen counter of your mind
Went into the kitchen to make some coffee butd reaction. She is a magical,
imperious flying machine. She kills to live; she lives to kill
Her fiefdom resembles mine:
A storey above the brick building village
I have ben bed-bound half a year.
Hallelujah gospel singer under cover, hover below my window.
Mine is just a guest appearance on this earth:
In my storey-above I read of Odette Hallowes
At Ravensbruck.
My collaboration with sky, epiphany
Flooding the room I write in:
I slip out of my human skin
Into the promised land.
FIEFDOM
A peculiarly English childhood of beatings & disdain
Travel videos from the cab of the train upfront in blizzard. Well done
in Birmingham accent highest praise even when having the bone-saw doing the job.
You fourteen years of age: beyond you only Birmingham: blackened brick, poor
area gardens bowed with soot: the extreme was:
beat cancer below the knee amputation.
(For Nina, my hawk-mate) New Rochelle 1948—Exeter, Canada 2020 & on)
HAWK you are not stitched inside me like roses bleeding thru a
quilted vest over heart:
But slower than breathing going from
Me
Tomboy turned ethereal
At eighty
Slowly filming myself back into my body:
The one that ran, threw my head back like a pony, laughed
In shirts soft as green new baby moss.
Back in them, these are the arms
That lifted my baby sister
That caught tree branches tis wing up
My ninety-pound body at twelve.
Paralyzed next thing
Ethereal borne on a plinth
Tomboy in knee-worn bluejeans:
Only my windbreaker on a thin nail survived the one who played with fire
stumblebum-child, turning upside down, somersaulting in the womb:
while thru translucent flames
I saw the untethered Jesse, the hooded rapt, flying free from the life I had
flown from.HARD CHOICES what to bring, what LEAVE behind
Mine could be a story in a struggling mill & mining town.
A pipe fitter building an ark in a backyard
A len opens
a shutter snaps:
A lens captures a world
Grainy texture or filmy as a gown.
Your unsung brilliance
I never stop rubbing together the stones of American poetry
The flow of kindness, river-like, unstoppable
the halo of bees.
THOUGH YOU SLEPT in today on an old horsehair mattress
On the back porch
the house sinking toward the evening side of the sky”—Ruth Stone
Picking pokeberries
In an old green smock
The scotch shimmers amber in the sun
Early winter
She is among the women mystics whose lives were worked by suffering.
From the time she wrote letters, she was always writing things down
She smelled the tree behind the book.
One house finch at a time
Darling darling this is a steeplechase
Around us life becomes surreal: a china plate is steel
Its reflections a cross between spiritual & industrial.
Evangelical comes the rain: cold, hard, winter rain
Like nails pressing the whole image
Down
Down
Down
Home has become a minefield:
A divorce ruptures here
A suicide there
Dirty Dick
Spotty Dick
It’s edgy:
Chips, open every right-angle in this painting:
Yes chips as they say, trench coat collars up, a smoke in left hand
Right one reaching out for the grab: as they say in Ireland.
“like how one recognizes beneath
The lightbulb the chick nesting within an egg” Enrique Vilasis
THIS IS SWEET GRASS CELEBRATION month
Sail on, silver girl:
She was a line cook
A chamber maid
& she’s a bridge over troubled water
Which roil
We have different ways of shining.
It’s autumn
A nostalgia song from Amanda Ann Plath & “Desert Flowers”
Now she smokes, has a beer with her husband
“Look at me. I cut school at age 16. Now I’m married & have a house,”
Hold me say those words
Sandpaper-voice:
She did nails while her children were small
Dare I ask her if I hold onto this ring I bought myself against my lover’s
will
(We need money for water-pipes, that type thing)
My royalties were small.
But my royalty.
Now my tomboy turned ethereal-voice feels rough
A grating in my chest
While she grates carrots for our slaw down the hall.
Does the line cook come back
Head thrown back in laughter that hurts?
Some portrait!
In sweet-
What does the municipality in whose park we chat
Think of curtsy to mimosa &playing painters to shadows?grass celebration month.
I PICTURE HER SUITING UP, even downing up as a doctor
After all she has clocked in thirty years
As community health worker
But who would ask for a CHW by name?
I would.
I do.
“If I get sick who will take care of me?”
I would.
Her son? Her daughter? Still dorky but beautiful at twenty
Her son not hurting for money, a good saver.
Her hubby a contractor, foreman
Who would bring the tea to her side?
Now her hips hurt at times
Climbing stairs
Or bending.
“Trout & Coffee” with her I’d celebrate
While doctors calibrate
Fidgety at home
What can they do against this disaster
(My only sign of age, she tells me, is wink-wrinkles)
Suit up against home life
Or suit down
Gas cookers were known as ageless servants:
Thrown windbreaker on chair
Unbutton collars
Hug kids
Once they quarantine
& self-isolate
Coming beaded out of the shower.
OUR HOUSE IS NOISY AS A CHICKEN YARD
Holding onto my sense of humour Wirth a death-grip
I zip into my windbreaker
While apples roll over the kitchen floor
Huge autumn billiard ball
Before the lost. / before the winter frost.
ORANGE
Or ange
Crushing thru autumn leaves
Washoard sky
Sunny whale ribs,
I think of an orange angel.
Maturity the hardest thing
Mica sheets separating
Like layers is bedding in a doll’s matchbox house.
Strike out near twilight;
All day I have pressed substance after substance to my cheek;
A Halloween stocking bought at the five and dime,…
When it is the plush of you cheek
I most want next to mine;
Gold angel
Mellow voice, alto, lank, length
Long as the time
Between noon and evening
Now that we own mature age like our names; gold angel, cigarette wrapping paper
When life was as long as a story a captured human told to save her life.
HERE COMES AN OLD city bus of sadness
Wide as the Missouri
A bucket of turned-down-suitors
A stash of tears
Swaying with a few passengers
so old it sag:
In lonely light
An Edward Hopper light.
The oldest woman in the back reminds me of Miss Macintosh my Darling.
She was born in Pace, Mississippi.
I remind myself of when young
When you offered me the little house, cottage type I never saw since a
wheelchair would have trouble going there
(As we had trouble in all maneuvers, especially your two huge African Besenji
dogs.)
It was end of day:
The black phone shook in its cradle like false teeth on Halloween
A death-rattle to your nerves
“Why don’t they leave us alone?”
At last they did:
Me transferred to the rocking chair which was damned hard from my wheels
You tiny, coal black shiny bangs, pudding-0bowl haircut at fifty
Two old maids (my poems wet on the kitchen counter)
Two children lost in the woods
While the muffins burned (they always did, you had trouble with all things)
My typewriter, rented, before the iced-in Boulder, Colorado table in your house
opposite the graveyard
The Flatiron mountains our archangels. Things stopped just like that, like the
sun those nigthfalls at three p.m. We became two old chidlren neither of us able
to tuck the other in. Dusted & Done.
NOW SHE LOOMS again on the skyline of American poetry
Listed in the catalogue of those who died from Alzheimers
From Arkansaas.
But actually she was from Mississippi.
Wrote the ekphrastic poem
The one on Giacometti
Renewed
For its length
Imitating his bodies.
My helper
I see her pushing the iron bar
In icon-light of the alchemized bar.
I want to write an ekphrastic poem about her
Painterly woman
Those rounds
Of her body
those chunky hands that have helped healed
Or been unable to heal
Many bodies.
Schedules run her life. But the wheel of her heart
gets stuck in a rut
and the little one she is cries & cries when she finds a razor in her beautiful
daughter’s diary.
RADIANT VICTORIAN SUN pours like varnish
Thru the fire-hazeYou a native, I a fresh immigrant
everything hurts while sun pours like rain
Shellacking
All but glass with antique dolls behind. Some blind.
Even over the dolls
Cabin fever abates.
I wait
Johnny Panic lies down
On a losing spree
my oldest friend:
Keys credit card
I dread she will lose her life.
The red brick elementary school we went to together
Is now a Jewish nursing home
Who remember our elementary school teachers?
We do
we came over on the Mayflower
To butterscotch seats at desks for sseatmates:
Carved out where the buttocks went
Whiny as lakes the chairs
The stairs used for bomb drills.
Our playground thrills
Were toned town:
peak fear calms down: the movie with tag lines:
God came to town to take one
of us. Polio .Too late for tracheotomy in ambulance
too late for iron lung.
This radiant day pales, darkened:
Yom Kippur
Sun sets over the iron. The lungs breathe out in, revelation in reverse:
butterflies disappearing.
41SPARROWS SINGING DURING shutdown, I am one
Hearing the silence of the rained-on stone.
My favorite community health worker:
She belongs in a tumbledown bar
Leaning forward
Straddling a bench
Smoking l
With that one gold bead driven int] the center of her tongue.
Catchlight to her personali
War returns:
Despair’s strange peaks:
Child of war:
Then of ward
—that parish whose prayer
was mischief, that of misery: not tree climbing but building:
Bed-heads we were: bald spots:
pudding basin haircut
signature of the forties. My poor abandoned little peacetime court: the
home.
I AM NOT THE BOMB but the bombed-out
We have rabbits. A war is on & one of the rabbits is with child.
When shortages kick in
Rabbit blanc mange will be savoured.
Celibacy was the order of the day
A thing our mother declared on her deathbed
Domestic rabbit clubs were spring up across UK
“Lovegrove’s” will only2323stock products available during the war.
Supplies of cardboard cartons
& Anderson shelters were
My collaboration with sky, epiphany
Flooding the room I wrote in:
I slipped out of my human skin
Into that indescribable creature: girl of twelve on the cusp, wet bangs from a
forbidden lakeside dip near the railroad yard abandoned.
In my dreams,
I lasso a wild steer on the first try.
I chauffeur Picasso
To meet up with Dali—
None of us is happy about this summit.
DONE & DUSTED
The unstoppable courage of lovey.
In bomber-jacket I float down.
HARDEST BY HARDEST (for Danielle Ofri, M.D.)
Harness-by-harness,
We drive on.
Your cruelest test as doctor,
My toughest
as survivor of paralysis before vaccine.
sterling example of her in the log-ago town of our childhood
Running her home from an iron long.
The mirror her morning herald minister of mercy. When world narrowed in.
For me it is a bather once a line cook, then chambermaid opens the portal
To let sea-light in;
a bathe, laugh, head thrown back which moves boulders as though twigs they were
twigs
compassion’s bride,
I have husbanded courage
As I must tomboy turned ethereal eighty year old woman
In North, in Christ’s snow & rain.
RING
I wear a marriage ring
Cycling hours of pain.
Where is anodyne
Arthur spurred his legends
I drive my spurs in
Mighty pain neighs
Till
Salvation comes in childhood games
Till ring around ecstasy
Will
All small down
Dusted and done.
PLEASE come visit me
With the speed call numbers were whisked
Down vacuum miraculously
In grade scool library.
Nothing magical about it
Any more than it is imperative noe at eight
I must lay my head upon my sweltered elbow and cry
O my poor people
Rationed to austerity a whittled branch of wills
I am become your ethereal tomboy..
WHO IS GATE-KEEPER ?
A boy & his father run for their lives
Taking refuge among trees
the mother has thrown them out
soldiers march
As thru a dream
In winter the boy’s mother dies.
There’s is a Brokeback age
*
Stand up & keep the peace:
Take the love
In your own hands.
Will it deepen wounds
If your whole life had not become the boy of snow
Although so slow
The drift it becomes
No shallow thing
but holy as wren in her den, fox in her hollow.
THE LESS OF SELF the better
The bedroom door neighs like a horse
There is a scent, undefinable, magnetic like honey suckle
I follow it
Hoping not to be hit
By a haven with way to exit the wound. The dream of ever getting well, all the
way?
One finds another territory despite all travel forbidden by limited mobility:
Under bruised skies,
Over bruge-tinted, rouge things: the less self, the better. Put on your
butterscotch sweater.
where is the object which throws the shade: where the broom to sweep up endless
childhood afternoons?
In my child-mind an uptown cloud over that town in Belgium of
OUR BROOM CLOSET is purple with shadows
One white swan feather floats free
Like a pebble sinking in a water glass.
You come close to kissing me.
The feather duster flops & isn’t that a mouse tails scoops between workbooks and
mops
While night begins to fill the brooms
With dustpan.
And dreams
Swirl
Like a prized marble with twists
Or barber shop pole
And I am filled with you like a glass greenhouse with light
As winter slams its pewter lid over our town; I like down:
Masked bereft as mare in cobbled court
All hallows coming on.
One feather floats free: you come close to kissing me.
THE LESS OF SELF the better
The bedroom door neighs like a horse
There is a scent, undefinable, magnetic like honey suckle
I follow it
Hoping not to be hit
By a haven with way to exit the wound. The dream of ever getting well, all the
way? the less of self, the better. Put on your chamoi sweater.
One finds another territory despite all travel forbidden by limited mobility:
Under bruised skies,
Over bruge-tinted, rouge things:
where is the object which throws the shade: where the broom to sweep up endless
childhood afternoons?
In my child-mind an uptown cloud over that town in Belgium of which I dream: as
the bee-keeper tends her bees: to produce honey without harm.WINDPIPE,
tracheotomy, transom
That shuttle against the lead
Windowpane
Could be an owl.
I will surprise you:
Beyond the treatment room dwells an owl
Sliced long the bare trees what is that thing?
Your thin voice above the radiation room.
It hovers
Then floats away
Only the chimney lets out a purple flight of smoke
Like Icarus
Feathers dissolving
Because he flew too near,
He dared the hope
Harrowing at first
At last
Annihilating
All but boy body slow-motion
Filmically from from the sun.
HOPE IS LIKE an old gate into a tea garden
Ancient
Its leaves have a fragrance
Like the slight pain, that of a bird pressing, passing against your forehead on
diagnosis.
Diaphagms with stencil marks
O you are no surprise to me
Worrisome thing
I would bat
Away
If it weren’t for the fact your softness touches my hand like chamois cloth
Like the first kiss
Inside the tea garden given, taken.
NO WHITE DRUG for my pain
Besides, in those days. . .
& dope up children too much.
I was, anyway, driven out fo myself by the wiled horses of paralysis
Sudden as a penny
Dropping in a well:
The water-rings
Wre thoseniight nurses
Revolving like planets at the Planetarium
Day nurses never shone:
No radiation
Could illumine them.
I wanted to see my next birthday
But maybe I’d done enough growing.
Though I felt I’d had a mere pinch worth of light since daybreak.
AFTER TWELVE
I know that I am bruisable, plummeting
The nurse who is my step mohter
Her eyes search mine.
She cannot name
What I have:
My parents have commanded this lest I visualize what often happens to chidlren
who contract this virus.
I do not know it is a virus.
I have counted a thoug=sand shadows from night to dawn:
One the chair holding my new hospital gown
Stiff, starched.
She is pregnant as well.
While she exchanges the crumpled night gown for the waxen fresh one
I want to touch her rounding Elly
But it hardly shows
Though there is a heartbeat within all that water pemenet
bruisable, pulsing, plummeting.
ALL THE GRAINY FACES from old photographs
Come up to me
While filmically my old psychiatric navy nurse, a real tough
Knows they need some muscle some muscles in the ward
I try, not cry, not shoutingly but with a steady voice
To ask my question one more time:
“What have I got? Will I die?”
neither received a clear answer.
I hanker for clarity
As once I climbed that treen
All gnarly bent
While I went
Straight as a whistle up up up to sky
While some driver passing must fear I’d die
In a fall breking my neck the way this waiting breaks my heart: all the faces
around moving grainy in an old photograph
While in pristine clarity outside my window stands the cenotaph
For all the children who have preceded me in death.
WE ALL CREATE A MAP in a fury
Inside my long-boned twelve—year old body
Are volcanoes erupting, min nature, fierce
& there are estuaries
But where can the reality run off
The only place I know
Is the turnover
Line
Of poetry:
Copper
Childhood being rubbed out by acid, by ashes
While now I learn
To stand again
On a wooden contraption
Called tilt table
As the fury of autumn
Maps inside outside my window
excruciatingly.
IS MY TESTAMENT scratched into a water-barrell?
What would I do in the silence that rests
After you have gone
Like the silence of my dolls. . .O
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3 - Afterword
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We are looking for other poets to feature in
this series, and are open to submissions. Please send one poem and a short
bio to - info@poetrykit.org
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