Ascent
I cannot live
without rapture.
Fashion me a house of compassion.
Carpenter, along the scaffold
I walk in bloody twilight.
My toes grip the boards.
I am seeking
out
my beloved.
The ladder has been
removed:
Solitary on the skeleton
I stand.
Only archangels
beyond.
***
Kid, twelve,
tormented
thy friend
will creep back
sheepishly,
set the ladder on the sill
and leave you place
to descend: First the slender feet
grip
the ladder,
then thy cold palms,
the upper rungs.
As you gaze
at the house you climbed
in the dirt field
it’s twilight.
Peace. The earth is cold.
The covenant is sealed.
Editor’s note: Originally published in Manroot Magazine and reprinted in Mark in Time; Portraits & Poetry/San Francisco, edited by Christa Fleischmann and Robert E. Johnson (Glide Publications, 1971).
Born in New York City at the end of the thirties, LYNN STRONGIN grew up as a musical child with a psychologist father and freelance artist mother. Following her parents’ divorce in the mid nineteen-forties when this was still not widespread, the second trauma of her childhood was contracting polio at age twelve. However, this allowed her to develop a gift for introspection. After studying musical composition, she went on to take a graduate degree in American literature and poetry at Stanford University. She is now totally devoting her life to poetry. She has written extensively about polio, the war years, and post-war life in her autobiography; INDIGO: An American Jewish Childhood. Her book SPECTRAL FREEDOM was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize in literature. She has made British Columbia, Canada, her home for the past thirty years, but still considers herself an American voice. Other subjects important to her are the American South, women’s freedom, and the injustices done to girls and women in such institutions as the Magdalene Laundries. She was recently nominated for the George Woodcock Lifetime Achievement Award in British Columbia.
