Childhood’s Fever Dream
HARD ladders I climb down
Far harder than up
into the blaze
Of Amsterdam; trading fire
The painter’s studio
A child’s fever dream
I leave it to you
how to separate the fuel from the color
How to care for orchids,
how to squint when you look at the stained glass
My brushes darken, to ash
The interpreter of maladies, for Knifers
The journey: turning the pages of the 1930’s,
our life we have in these five rooms the holiest:
This is like riding in a carriage of stone,
to turn down clipboards
Having bitten the bullet to head Home.
Editor’s note: “Childhood’s Fever Dream” is a new poem first published in this issue of storySouth.
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.
