Lynn Strongin – Silent

Strongin LE P&W September 2023

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Live Encounters Poetry & Writing September 2023

Silent, poems by Lynn Strongin.


Silent

. . . the doorbell as falling snow
Guests
Personages, courtesans gone now.
No longer come.
A fox-hound sky, clouds the color of almond.
I press my ear to sky. Glory be! Bread of the Angels would restore me.
Tucked away in hangars. Insies and outsies.
Grain is blocked by war the other side of the world;
People are starved. Whereas my Aunt Vi has a history implant in her.
So the twilight of life is marred. We are just guests. All things lost
come back to haunt me: North, South, East, West. Mimosa feathers
and shade trees . . . woven on a mountain loom
By a jubilance broken under the howling foxes,
in wonder of a winter moon…


Leaning into it,

your birthday. Faraway. You’re catching up on chocolates.
In Ireland it’s a bank holiday
a dining bucket list for that late summer get-away.
In dream comes tall rangy gourmet girl with a twist
her cosmetics from Mary Kay
the school of lost silks.
Leaning back to catch your breath,
‘lost you’ you say conversation’s end. Lady, it’s curtains.
Coffee-colored suede,
You shrug off as many losses as the leopard’s spots.


© Lynn Strongin

Lynn Strongin was born and raised in New York city. She has twelve books of poems. NEA, two PEN Grants, a Woodcock emergency Writer’s Grant, Canadian. Her latest book KIOSK is published in Liverpool, U.K. upcoming are an interview with Danielle Ofri, M.D. and a feature in storySouth where her work will be featured. She lives in Victoria, British Columbia this autumn.

One Reply to “Lynn Strongin – Silent”

  1. Hi Lynn,

    I have read a few threads of your work but much more importantly about YOU. And…of course…your poetry is about you. I so recall when we met for the first time when Sara and I became acquainted. You invited me to your lovely home and we chatted about so many things and I connected at a fun level. Remember? We talked about our jobs as typists/secretaries early on in our lives and how we hid pages of errors and threw them into the wastebaskets and brought them home so that our ‘bosses’ would not know that we made those typing errors, whatever……I was touched that someone else had the honesty to talk about those foibles.

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