From Paschal Poem: Now in the green year’s turning

by Lynn Strongin

Part Three
(Dream Dialogues)

             Run, run, run with the rising moon!
The people are sleeping in calico,
and you (my heart) do not know where to go.

             The older poet said to me:
             Your poems have grown tough,
             but not tough enough.

***

             Pity is like a river.
             It walks like me,
             though.
             (How can I get away from my bones?)

The way rain pours into flat rock…
that kindly pity soaks into me.

Carpenter,
lay out smoothe nails/and
piece me together:
sand the rough planks,
but admire the smooth and fine-grained
of my soul.

song: (I thought that I
             would never find
             a kinder wind
             until I found
             a wind gone blind.)

I know—
you will tell me
I am
…too gentle:
I cannot last:
I have had that feeling, too
                                                      (about you.)

(The wind—the world, shifted into
             a deeper color blue.)

Monseigneur:
             everything is wrong with me:
             for one thing: I have no…right
             to feel such a bone-tenderness
             for one of my same sex.

***

[Finger-to-lip:]
Creature is tired. Creature doth need rest.

***

Shoulders like ships, come over the corn
thrashing silence
and a kind of blue sky (sheaved, shelved),
—a slow spoken creature.

[Very still:]
                          (Is my infirmity
                          the reason why
                          when people touch my body
                          I feel shy?)

***

Wildflower opening to the wind—
O Lord! there is the word the lame
can speak only to you…
(why must I live out my life in this frame?)

I keep searching the word to transform
me
             …into a renaissance boy again;
keep waiting, breathlessly, for some god
to lay his hand upon my shoulder, and
transform the bone into the wing.

Or some god, listening, to lay his hand
upon my body
and…whisper, it is enough /to be a poet…

***

and this may be the word of the mystical
             and this of the green, impossible
                          longing
                                        of
                                                     spring.

***

Beyond mere nakedness
stands something else:
a further reach I strain to bring to light:
and this I bore, I bared to him:
To dare to look the angel in the eyes.

I touch my body—and I leap toward God!
(I swear, I do not speak these words to shame:
they labor forth through deep, inarticulate praise):
It is a joy beyond—beyond!
I offer this as proof of Him:
the ultimate embrace: the ecstasy.

Editor’s note: This is part 3 of a 4-part poem by Strongin originally published in 31 New American Poets edited by Ron Schreiber (Hill and Wang, 1969).

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.