Mother and Child
(listen to the poem, read by Diane R. Wiener)
WE FOLD ONE MORE EVENING away on a shelf.
Linen, Lamb.
Lit by moon. If not born here, drawn here. Steam still puffing out of the engine.
Or cozy up. Nava, a reckless romantic plunge.
Continuing our journey across the Cotswolds; trench coat to chin, ciggie-lighting.
Jaw-dropping. Liven up the yeast, bread-making.
Honey-colored stone,
Instead of IV’s. top marks. you are a grasshopper reading. Carrot-top.
Rembrandt’s son. Leggy, years nine.
Rule out aphrodisiacs
Home over hospital our secret ceremony is unfolded with the sachet in the pillow, beloved, my Lesbian, we fold in.
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Coda: Flowers in Silk Sunlight
(listen to the poem, read by Diane R. Wiener)
I take a broom out the back door
It snows. I sweep snow.
I am not a doll.
I keep the darkness away
While a little motor goes down the dirt road
And everything riles my lover.
Illness distorts;
convex lens
Becoming concave. Forgiveness
The loss; it is a pain in the left rib. I am a bird, not a child. Was once, now Bubula asks why I went in iron leg braces all those years, until the door opened on eternity, a falcon, I flew home on my Jesse; nothing now riled. My angels were good to me.
Editor’s Note: “Mother and Child” and “Coda: Flowers in Silk Sunlight” (part of a sequence of five poems entitled, “Rain on Doll Hospital”) originally appeared in Word For/ Word: A Journal of New Writing (Issue 43, Autumn 2024), and are reprinted with the author’s permission. Accompanying artwork is by the author’s mother, Marguerite Strongin. Lynn Strongin retains copyright for Marguerite Strongin’s artwork.
Read excerpts by Lynn Strongin in this issue of Wordgathering.
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About the Author
Born and raised in New York City to first-generation Jewish immigrants from Ukraine and Romania, Lynn Strongin contracted polio at age twelve and is paralyzed from the waist down. She earned a Bachelor’s with Honors from Hunter College and a Master of Arts from Stanford University. Lynn won a National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Grant. She has published twelve books, her work appears in thirty or so anthologies, she worked for the American poet Denise Levertov, and she received encouragement from Kay Boyle, Robert Duncan, and Robert Frost. Lynn was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize in Poetry for her book, Spectral Freedom. Reflecting on Strongin’s poetry, Laura Chester, co-editor of Rising Tides: 20th Century American Women Poets (Simon and Schuster, 1973), writes, “Outrage, talent, and voice meld together into something sublime, like an unearthly blue, rising above pain to create images that are so pure, they almost hurt. Is this prose or is this poetry, or perhaps a new form altogether, one that rises above and goes beyond?” Danielle Ofri, M.D., Ph.D., author of What Doctors Feel: How Emotions Affect the Practice of Medicine (Beacon Press, 2014) and Editor of the Bellevue Literary Review, notes of Strongin’s memoir, “In this tender and probing memoir, Lynn Strongin traces a life shaped by illness, upheaval, and the quiet resilience of language Navigating the aftermath of polio, the ache of dislocation, and the long shadow of loss, she probes how memory and poetry can both fracture and mend the self.”
Artist Marguerite Strongin was born in 1914 to Romanian parents. She studied with the great sculptor, Alexander Archipenko, and at the Art Students League in New York City.