filled the frame of girlhood; Illness, not the Confederates marching:
it was impossible to sleep in that night:
one turned to left, then to right: cannons roared. I have a burn on my arm still.
Of course some of my days were dazzling white as birch.
But mainly I remember nights:
the long tunnels
down which jet & winds spilled
their fuel lit then by the imaginative mind of the child.
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.
from Epileptic Projections