March 2022
Lynn Strongin
yosunt@shaw.ca
Bio Note: Born in New York City at the end of the 'dirty thirties', I grew up as a musical child with a psychologist father and freelance artist mother. I wrote extensively about polio, the war years, and post-war life in my autobiography; Indigo: An American Jewish Childhood. My book Spectral Freedom was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize in literature. 


FAMILY LIFE — there’s no telling it without torque:
Amid tenderness:
Its fretwork, hard work

lost buttons
Potatoes gone green
The skin of our living. Air stains lungs.

Keep raising the bar of kindness
Do a lot of unboxing
Curve the heart around it
	making home life more harmonious
	the only life we know is small buttons, 
	mismatched potatoes, the bread 
	starting with a twist: this & only this.
	
		~~~

Throat

There is an outcry from the throat
The windpipe tightens
The voice-box

From which comes 
Each note
Reflects the fact that children 
will forget the alphabet, their numbers 
if plague     shuts schools down

One after another
Wave-after-wave of the plague
Has resulted in enormous setbacks in their learning journey:
	As a result, child-after-child goes down in darkness
	More than night: throat & then a lung-stab: 
	soon to be in a field hospital, 
	brought in on wood & cloth gurney.
	
		~~~                        


IT IS LIKE raising my voice from the grave
To want to be close to you again.
Sky is blinding, a pattern starched, ironed:

Love is binding
Who makes the first move in morning?
To correct the misalignment of our lives? 
History followed suit as history has a way of doing;

Buildings bite into sky
Nervous at the thought of a hospital stay, O soul as I grow older
You shine on a plate, dancer, before me brighter & brighter.
	I will wax poetic
	A modal element, music: Lawrentian mode, 
	jump ropes jump into sky: 
	what is this independence to me?
©2022 Lynn Strongin
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