Untitled
FIRST, OUR VILLAGE LAMPLIGHT disappeared, now our peacock
Roosts elsewhere or is gone. Around Mother, things broke & feel.
Circle the soul.
My options narrow like a tunnel
With harsh words,
It is a harder, sharper place I come back to till the magic restarts.
Our peacock does not show
Those iridescent wings
That cut thru our opaque surfaces & words.
Lord, take me to a place where my children look at me as though not born of me:
Boots worn, leathern so shod they move me like young modern Gods.
Editor’s note: “Untitled” 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.
