Last night when I should have been sleeping
I be waking and wondering after that long video of
sound and pain
They say I woke confused, woke with questions.
No wonder when we keep descending deeper
Into blind thuggery.
No wonder my soul was restless
me like a newly skinned one
Crying, gaping open to this collective hurt.
And We Come to Dream of Great Fights
Sometimes the bark
of that chokecherry tree
bites all that is ripe in you
because that alien growth
growing pushes you far inside all
delicate. and we come to dream of great fights
Achilles, Susan B Anthony, Mohammed Ali
and we want to know
how they did it,
how they held on to win.
Chinese parchment paper
inscribed with your names
their flourishes
delicious aftertastes of
a commitment greater
than what the sky could ever say
The Puritan Mystique
We are a people still of Puritan stock
Who learned to belittle the body.
All the great warriors Anne Bradstreet, the sweet
Jonathan Edwards, Roger Williams and Anne Hutchison
among them fought to
Be with things as they are, not as they ought to be.
One of the main fights was the flesh. They engulfed
themselves in dull clothes covers.
Now, centuries later, many believe it fine
to throttle the flesh, to degrade it into a mass
in behalf of some principle or other.
It enrages me to read of Tyre Nichols
The disrespect of body, of his self.
We are still in Salem ostracizing and beating others.
Let’s grow up.
…is long time advocate for peace and freedom. Her criticism and poetry are highly published nationally and internationally. Her latest book Sunfishing is available at Amazon. She wants to do everything she can to save this world and its people.
Once I walked yellow with flecks
The Berlin wall was falling, far away
I could not have then seen strawberries
glistening on the hedge.
Endings are old new beginnings.
They do cry for salt after all.
They mix sears of pain with a curse of Cain.
On my walk I fried tulips
Cried aloud the names of lovers their races and places.
Until all at once the field of strawberries glistened
and my beating heart
a Euphoria of happiness.
Beginnings are new old endings.
And we start out over again.
Growing Up Hard
Murder and defamation shook my house down,
left me lying in cold damp weeds, squishy.
Persnickety. Sometimes going up Snake Road,
the stars outside in open night made
my thumbs bump uncontrollably and I ran
to find the top of any hill,
any thing
Those days I thought of James Meredith, Medgar Evans
and I screamed into green air with the crickets
piping red loud. Death was in the air and how,
like Mercé Rodoreda's epic “Death in Spring,”
hypocrisy was snapping my garter belt tight on my thighs.
This mystery time went two ways for or against.
Cucumbers and carrot sticks kept us soused
in quiescent racism and maudlin pretense.
Death in Africa and shootings in Alabama left me
knowing the world was in apocalypse now
Bleeding sheer bone spit. Meanwhile people
everywhere kept dying, electrocuted hung and shot.
UN speeches blared.
A bleeding bristling bone split.
We should go up at once, and possess it,
for we are well able to overcome it.
—Caleb, Num. 13:30
Whenever tides spun avid
Wherever it was inevitably dark
Annie sang soft whisper memories,
of what was said quiet in her parents
bed.
At first glance she was a small circumference
in others views—
one gentle cell dreaming.
Her mind waters welled
like the tides blood
and Annie without knowing
why searched in her gentle blue
for Caleb a man all strenuous!
He of the mind’s rough face.
His voice a rocket to Annie’s
stillness Sometimes she even
thought quiet like a night star,
some times calm dreaming
her intransitive wonders running.
Caleb he burned too hot for her cool
she felt in this soft black cave the souls,
spirits of the balmy present, turning and turning
Annie could not reach the off switch
to silence restless Caleb burning.
She tried turning off that switch
To un-wriggle his wrestling
ongoing transitive chaos.
And Annie bless her she said
I want to slide
not to possess
to roam not to own
reds periwinkles and blue hyenas
the best.
Me a cauldron flaming
The sun is fading before my eyes
As I try to make sense of my life that
is in many baskets. Many kitchen doors
with high ranging stoves and tilting floors and bonfires.
It’s odd the sun is fading and I am not.
My heart is a cauldron of music sound love and sadness.
The sun will not always fade. While I am around
I’ll stay a flaming cauldron.
This year many leaves are thick
with matter and hang themselves on,
burning with unique brightness
in the cauldron of life loving eyes.
…was West Coast Berkeley born and raised with the light of freedom. Educated at UC Berkeley and San Francisco State, Linda has taught, protested and lived internationally. Her last book, Sunfishing, can be bought at Amazon. She grew up surrounded by radicals, experimentation and innovation, and is proud to continue her radicalism.
Bigots have no spigots of charity
They burn bias with threaded needles
As a way of catching and trapping us
God save all our souls from this evil contamination
Of such wickedness and sadness.
Let us stand on the streets together
Tall and proud
And read poetry with each other
Hug and love with all our muster
To share a shining nuance of the wonderful
While this untenable world circumnavigates around
in crippling blindness
Life Could Be A Weapon for Change
Life could be a weapon for us to change, to live even,
To spread peach plenty about the shade,
To drink frozen oleanders,
To soften the pain of drone death and safe words.
Say your speech to wake us from wanton laziness
When in the near distance
People implode in pain and panic,
Sting entrenched pale in pus and puke.
If half the world is jerking like that,
We must not tell ourselves Christmas stories.
Drink drunken words that crash shields
Let your comfortable life quiver and unsettle.
We may all then might maybe come together
in a vast epic colloquy,
as in Odysseus with Telemachus
two great forces affirming the inchoate shape of
that uncertainly love.
How we face the world
Quote here—add return / line break
only if more than half-way across page.
Make regular block when adding this.
—Attribution (source)
Whenever tides spun avid
Wherever it was inevitably dark
Annie sang soft whisper memories,
of what was said quiet in her parents
bed.
At first glance she was a small circumference
in others views—
one gentle cell dreaming.
Her mind waters welled
like the tides blood
and Annie without knowing
why searched in her gentle blue
for Caleb a man all strenuous!
he of the mind’s rough face
His voice a rocket to Annie’s
stillness Sometimes she even
thought quiet like a night star,
sometimes calm dreaming
her intransitive wonders running.
Caleb he burned too hot for her cool
she felt in this soft black cave the souls,
spirits of the balmy present, turning and turning
Annie could not reach the off switch
to silence restless Caleb burning.
She tried turning off that switch
To unwriggle his wrestling
ongoing transitive chaos.
And Annie bless her she said
I want to slide
not to possess
to roam not to own
Red periwinkles and blue hyenas
The best.
Palm Sunday Passover
This great tide of solar beginnings
Growth indivisible—beyond words
Such reawakenings
When we green ourselves
Sun spices everything stronger
A triumphant glare shows you
and her and the world wallows with us
all in now when life wells to a head.
Plant blooms bloom more
In a plethora of themselves
A grand annual rejoicing
When our faith strengthens
In silent joy that all is what it is
That we can be blooming now together.
How I Miss Him on Labor Day
My indomitable father was a man of unseen dreams
In all his grey garb he looked so gentle
Like a philosopher assembling life drifts.
Life and injustice forced him to get rock taut
Like those Herbeden’s nodes
Marking his knuckles so beady.
As a girl, to grow I had to challenge
That certainty he held so tight
Fear quiet there in his feeling And between us we gained
Mutual lifelong soul respect.
He would come to Grand Rapids and
walk with his beret and cane in the Labor Day parade
in honor of workers, of you and we, dignity
and of his daughter, perennially late sleeping me.
…is a poet professor musician who now lives in Michigan although her past is coastal and international: Spain and California. Author of four books of poems and finishing her next book, Sunfishing, Linda is a life-long activist, sun-lover and dreamer. She was raised in an activist family from the start. A hopeless romantic, sometimes inequities everywhere drive her to despair and to writing action.
Dylan Thomas wrote "Death Shall Have No Dominion"
And we are learning how near it is, how uncertain life is now.
We need to stipple our moment,
Make every second resound with deepest glory,
tell that story double time.
Perhaps the fear will bring us nearer to writing a new story
To love each other obsessively and newly
With the desire of new hearts,
undominated souls.
…is a poet professor musician who now lives in Michigan although her past is coastal: Spain and California. Author of four books of poems and currently finishing her next book, Sunfishing, Linda is a life-long activist, sun lover and dreamer. A hopeless romantic, sometimes inequities everywhere drive her to despair and to writing action.
The Strait of Gibraltar
Is all a glisten this Veterans Day morning
Sunlit pieces of history
Matriculate and spin in holy flatness
Sun surge cups my heart in praise of
All that came here before.
The wars that surged the coasts
that impinged like furtive eyes
The blood rich battles, the hurry
for winning in this tight radiant channel
This light could dissolve me in my room
Looking at painting floating on the wall
Being nearby this way to Miguel de Cervantes
Maiming his left arm at Trafalgar
In a night smile I touch Miguel de Cervantes
Fighting here and Lord Nelson, caps,
swords and daring Emma Hamilton with a flair
Their ships flaunting the air in zealous lust
pushing madly through,
pushing through fervor war hysteria
aligned in light, bare blood and bones
In this wild thin space, earth enclosed
To win more in the sea and the sun
Floating in this straight strait
To be up to this glorious moment
Wild living in this brooding loud and dazzling glory
While I drift sorely trying to get earthly
Balance back.
Quote here—add return / line break
only if more than half-way across page.
Make regular block when adding this.
—Attribution (source)
How War Kills Silence
Skews the words buried
There. How in the Valley of the Fallen,
the skins of Franco’s Murdered stink war and shriek
Deja me estar let me be me
In a silent light which welters
Peaceful living in a bright sky
My soul springs a strange hardiness
To accost the noise of the killers whose rampant madness
stifles the splendid sound of soundless Beethoven
I say no pasarán
Today is like waiting on
the Titanic for rising
water to eclipse us.
Visions of Marcelino Peñuelas
telling of fascist censorship with the great
charm of the Spanish language full of lips and dips.
I hear Malvina Reynolds singing in the back seat,
her spirit constant and believing.
I see all these fighters who would not back down ever.
No pasarán
And me facing a siege of ice
darkening when I want to
read and write. Primeval. Humbling.
Pegging about with flashlights.
Rose and Jack faced inevitable waters
but they had each other.
Robert Frost knew the terror of ice
"But if it had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
To know that for destruction ice
Is also great
And would suffice."
Tonight the taps will resound
like thunder claps and I will
memorize my words and see the great ones
fighting for a promised land.
For A New House Before the Election Poem
It was a military mob,
swarming
as a hive might, quite.
A concave movement.
A kind of cleaving.
The rotten pieces hanging
as a gang would
in that shining
knot of pain evil brings
ready to bite and cling and stick to.
We the people must leave our dens
and walk to forever to cut them out
to let our strong peace beauty spread.
She said I’ll blow your house down.
She said this evil has lit too many fires.
I’ll blow your house down, she said.
…is a poet professor musician who now lives in Michigan although her past is coastal: Spain and California. Author of four books of poems and currently finishing her next book, Sunfishing, Linda is a life-long activist, sun lover and dreamer. A hopeless romantic, sometimes inequities everywhere drive her to despair and to writing action.
In the Kremlin the guards were monsters of the kind
of secrecy that flattens souls,
an enormous place for hiding spies and jewels
where the air rang of old czars and killings.
It was as though i too was masked and silenced
there in that killing quiet.
That killing quiet.
I tried to imagine a blond czarina playing cards,
being able to sing her songs in that pernicious silence,
those halls staggered large and long everywhere,
Lenin outside preserved forever, what a deadly fear
and the polite waiting lines
all too silent
and I played Bartok and B.B. King voraciously
loud to obliterate that crippling politeness.
Time In War
We lived in the war pasting coupons
page after page in the war our parents
subdued for us, banned in a loud quiet.
banning feeling in themselves
keeping the lights bright. We lived in a war
bleeding alone, for there was no tv
to see. Night radio muffled. The war hit our hearts,
what else? We ate polite weeklong pot roasts
And knew something was missing. It was fear
that the world would not be here, nor we,
that the rituals would crash like Alice
fell through, fell to newwhere-land
Oh, where will we go when we pass
into you? Will our hearts even start?
Who will keep this ritual life going
with all the killing and darkness?
Anne Frank at least she said, and Joan of Arc withstood.
And we all targets geographical and physical
And we exposed and frightened, having
to put a good face on this evil which threatened all
those war days and witch-hunt days and
always in our ever oppositional living
And now again as the long days pass casting evil
Again I wander-wonder alone what I’ll do when
Life turns into a living bomb cast and I’ll have no
Pot-roast or pretense. Writing my
Globetrotting weapon and disguise.
In out and all about. In rife absurdity.
Calm the bombs and silence the mad.
Let’s feel clear water and soft words all
Green, clad in long love and trust beyond bloodshed
Not hope but a sudden heartening.
Wall Mural by @2022 My Dog Sighs Northcote Lane, Cardiff, Wales
One Night after Ukraine
Voice is an old cliche I’m
Not proud to say that closer
It’s just all getting tighter
Any way I see mushrooms
I see that angular nose
Spelling the world and time falling:
War cries upon us again harder
Takes it onto us harder.
We’ve watched all this before
Now let us speak
peace surer & surer
Let no dictator bite the
Worlds chestnuts out and
eat their way in. Stand up and plunder their bones harder
And harder harder till our cliches stick true
Ukraine Besieged
Stones unto bones unto trinkets
there was a time I ain’t gonna
study war no more bones
no more shocks
Stones onto my big heart
bones unto war
no more and like death
stones us tight into our years
We have forgotten there was a time
We locked hands and remembered
Those bones
those overtones of war
And now there are three wars
Anyway
Where has all the young love gone
Stones unto bones unto trinkets.
Poems make a shape
they take like magic
in a Finnish prayer
they reach eternity
where we’re all marching
for peace, for each other,
our feet preaching peaceful.
…is a writer born in Berkeley who has been socially aware all her life. Years in Franco’s Spain only taught her more about group action and collaboration. Professor of American and teaching World literatures teach her how to live and love. Intensity is her middle name.
I want to read books that
live in the air, that turn colors
into permanent shrines as Cather and Carver
each commute our psychological entrapments
Into shapes of blue boats and white clothes
flapping in a midsummer breeze.
It is to say I want to hold
on to something so that words
are not what I have to use
when I talk to you
but beacons and lifejackets
in the rage of the line,
the ripple of the moment
when everything goes on through
and into each other.
Writing is our shrine to live by,
to learn from, to shine for.
In the spring reading Ripley's colored
Believe books, I thought of Wonderland
and hookahs, of the ways things go through
each other to the other side of things.
An eloquent vanishing.
Not just any bell book and candle,
But Kim Novak effervescent on Powell Street
Elizabeth Taylor shining gold
Near where the water was,
near where the mysteries lay uncovered.
Where the swami speaks of transformation
and solid things shiver
Bigger
…is a writer born in Berkeley who has been socially aware all her life. Years in Franco’s Spain only taught her more about group action and collaboration. Professor of American and teaching World literatures teach her how to live and love. Intensity is her middle name.
In the sun we were riding
In the sun where the green
grass was yellow bending
in such consummate purity California
you were a paradise
spinning open freedom. Inviting us in.
We lived in wood, touching trees
Wind-chimes and abacus.
We ate food we made our own.
Inside flutes and recorders
Oboes and harpsichords in a cool plush of sound.
We ate chicory and wild violets like paintings
It all grew slower, then, on that road.
Where we got a second wind
fables of the new earth and its people.
Making all this new energy together
And outside this silent plenty
A sheet of rich yellow
A violin and a soprano
Singing of freedom
…is a writer born in Berkeley who has been socially aware all her life. Years in Franco’s Spain only taught her more about group action and collaboration. Professor of American and teaching World literatures teach her how to live and love. Intensity is her middle name .
This great tide of solar beginnings
Growth indivisible—beyond words
Such reawakenings
When we green ourselves
Sun spices everything stronger
A triumphant glare shows you
and her and the world wallows with us
all in now when life wells to a head.
Plant blooms bloom more
In a plethora of themselves
A grand annual rejoicing
When our faith strengthens
In silent joy that all is what it is
That we can be blooming now together.
…is a writer born in Berkeley who has been socially aware all her life. Years in Franco’s Spain only taught her more about group action and collaboration. Professor of American and teaching World literatures teach her how to live and love. Intensity is her middle name.
Sometimes I feel like I'm ageing,
backwards, i don't know
how we can go forth
when we're sinking so fast
under malevolent ignorance
And spring is shining so
bewitchingly.
When I think of Spain,
which I do in my sleep, in my dreams, in my everywhere,
I see women in black all clean
with ardent faces and a smile
below all that plain pain
I hear Spain, their tongue-driven voices
rambunctiously them.
Please dear humanity
Do not let them be splayed and
Agonized like death clouds again.
Heart
As of now that rising sound
Below my neck reminds me of Baku,
And Boris my remote cousin. It is that
I’m not breathing like I should be.
It is like it happens apart from me.
I stare and listen hard to that whine.
It’s as though I’m carrying Geronimo
up high on CaveFighters Hill.
Only the lonely would complain
and only the lonely will remain
here in a vast vat of love
of understanding and profundity,
a way to live for you and me.
Stay away from green eggs
and purple devastation.
Don’t, like a cavalier, give your
heart away to the hawks.
As Katherine says in The English Patient
the “heart is an organ of fire.”
Be sure to keep that organ
with another: to cast your lightning
into each other’s excited airs.
Some Times
Inspired by The Rolling Stones
“You can’t always get what you want But if you try sometime you find You get what you need”
It’s like I don’t write a poem to explode out
It’s like I don’t write a poem to complain in
It’s like when I start to hear the call to write
I start to float it’s like to float inconspicuous
It’s like pieces of time and what’s mine join
In a moment of homeostasis overtime
It’s like poetry is a sublime
coming together. Feast and famine
Holding place in this oneness
A permanent addition like a mission
Which we can make when pieces of time
And what’s mine align in homeostasis sublime
To be ours for hours making such oneness rhyme.
at night in a quiet room
she sank deep into the lights of dreaming,
to hold on to what she was
finding out about seeing colors,
nuances shaping up in the night.
Her always wide eyes. Wheezes
knocking at the doors of her chest
like shutters flapping in a Texas wind.
The decisive whack of wood.
Even when nobody heard her
hear to say the fabric of what
she was coming to know to think,
When she was all locked up little
in those taffeta clothes, tiny buttons and plackets,
tight around her. When she was bending
her toes around, wriggling them, just to tell
how she saw to herself. To remember the smooth spots
that she knew she knew by heart
but only when she was alone
those times fitting into herself
while she was in the corner
coming to settle into herself.
Just knowing how she was
in that light of hers darkly,
paddling the peeling moments like a sailor
and starching the intricate fibers of memory
with near collarbone precision.
Her voice a feather of tulips in the morning.
There Came This Big Rush
So when and if then,
there came this big rush,
a rash of factors
which took you back to
a giant shadow of memory
on the waterfront,
California light falling
and breathing in, then,
it was when history was,
seemingly sublime,
in the kind of closeness
we would die for, then,
but it was happening, here,
now longshoremen big armed
talking like veteran labor leaders.
Tillie Olson said a Mrs. Dalloway idea,
pondering soft. It was all bodies
and more, beyond the blue line, blessed.
It was people living, bulging themselves.
In mass, together, out loud voluptuous:
It was real life warm out of the factory
lasting like Sunday hotcakes.
The Breath of my Blood
These two years
Have thickened me, left me bewildered,
High and dry as the debris in an elephant’s eye,
Ringing unanswered bells in white hell halls.
How I wanted to run again
And to seem determined.
How the breath of my blood
Stiffened and I came to
Look nice without my old exotic,
That fire in a thin emphatic face,
Those lingering lips and know it all eyes,
How my feet grow restlessly stiff
How I sleep with oxygen
How I have gotten permanently
Sick dramatically and unrecoverably smitten
It Was He Who Knew
It would be Blake who knew
It was the body which made us fair,
More than stray stone bullets.
His world was so physical
His inner light transfused matter
Into a moan of joy rushing in
To the plenty of us all so physical
That each petal of our being
Sang itself way before Whitman
Blake grew the Cartesian split into harmony.
He made us big again,
Big in our girth and our worth.
He would take the full nine yards of us:
“You never know what is enough
unless you know what is more than enough,” he dared.
And he feasted and saturated and wept sublime
to encounter what he saw with a naked burly view.
His path was not to split body and soul.
Nay, he wept the veins and nerves whole.
The Reunion of the Soul and Body William Blake, 1813
The cloudy shores of today
If life is now more of an adverb,
Participles all stuck in the sun,
Wrapped sticky in virus,
All we say now is how we see it
Not what, since facts died with Trump
So verily how we find each other is the final
Dusty piece to play for dessert each to each
It’s Kafka au lait in the cloudy shores of today.
Other girls remember baking cookies—
I remember Joseph Stalin dying
and the holocaust with McCarthy.
My Raggedy Ann doll had charcoal
eyes hot with a black cold light
All my years I've tried to choose
a way out but my heart
is two-fold:I'm with the people
and with the fires in my first by myself sight
In This, Dying
And we wake to a slue of death
Every day now come the morning.
Someone’s blood gets blown dead
And i can’t stop seeing those tribes,
Long woven beards and fields of opium
Waving and thickening in Afghan sun
Charlie Watts a panacea of balance
And substance, he was a golden child gone.
Don Everly widening in the time of his dying.
Such a classical hillbilly he was. Susie wake up.
It’s that we’ve shot our loads. In deliberate.
In our wicked lust to have more of more
And all the lives we ever lived and all the lives to be
Are full of trees and changing leaves,
Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse
Soft bird, as though we’ve only just begun,
The way our arms reach upwards as though
Hanging in a William Blake painting
In which closeness is everything
The spiritual become all physical
A radiant yellow cloud of pulsing light
In spite of all the bad light around
This beauty only makes a luscious sound
Soft bird, you and I continue to soar
Onward and upwards forever more.
This natural national revolution
has taken my breath away
and given me my heart back
in a democratic moment
when sharing is the name of the game
all these different people becoming one
in the winter Washington sun
where we’ll make new rules new ways
to give more that many an authentic say.
How wonderful it is that
nobody need wait a single moment
before starting to improve the world.
Anne Frank
It is like how to explain the paucity of beauty
On a hillside, how to hold silence stiller
Clumps of marjoram, Greek symbol of happiness, make a plenty.
Forthwith in this troubled land where the President of France
Was face cuffed, where thousands of sick boys
Play murderous games and sing aloud to blood.
How to hold silence stiller to make a plenty,
When I was then her she held life in this staring.
In the city she saw the moon sail and marjoram
Grew while she stood trying to understand Anne Frank
Who was too a little girl staring like she was and going
To feel her roots and her eyes pulverized all dying
We must hold silence riper and green the marjoram.
I grew up in a struggle.
Like always.
Like there was no peace.
Ever. But for the Bay.
That blue quiet light.
What can i say?
Inside the edges of childhood
sick red baited & bothered,
It made you bonkers in a new way;
the house shook on its stilts. No silk.
Just struggle.
What more can i say?
Bias Burning Time
Bigots have no spigots of charity
They burn bias with threaded needles
As a way of catching and trapping us
God save all our souls from this evil contamination
Of such wickedness and sadness.
Let us stand on the streets together
Tall and proud
And read poetry with each other
Hug and love with all our muster
To share a shining nuance of the wonderful
While this untenable world circumnavigates around
in crippling blindness
Ubiquitous need
Feeling the hunger
in the streets
I don’t
matter anymore
my slow lapse
a particle
in the span
of ubiquitous wanting
everywhere barbarous
greed and rapacious
capitalist
tyranny
This is the time for God,
for a roaring sonorous voice,
a biblical moment, indeed,
when we’re shouldering the slaughtered daily,
trying to assuage the fire of fear in and around us,
when leaders spring forth and speak
with the hallowed tone of the ancient tabernacle.
Ages old salt smells, a smear of blood
We’re ready for the divine, dying alive in our
concern. This big, larger than life moment
when life and death waver voluptuously around us.
Modern Life Is Being
masked faces in the cubist ball
that modern life is being,
that modern life is seeing
masked ones gloved and covered
floating mindless in Edgar Allan Poe’s hives,
his Masque of the Red Death breaking,
reality cracks & strange shapes rattle
much like Robert Louis Stevenson incubates
fabulous forms his boats steering far off course, heroes double vestiges of how they thought themselves to be what they were
Poe and RLS brilliant slantwise visionaries. Besides they spun torn lives on the edge,
blooming irregular tunes, masked and twisted.
LINDA E. CHOWN grew up in Berkeley, Ca. in the days of action. Civil Rights arrests at Sheraton Palace and Auto Row. BA UC Berkeley Intellectual History; MA Creative Writing SFSU; PHd Comparative Literature University of Washington. Four books of poetry. Many poems published on line at Numero Cinq, Empty Mirror, The Bezine, Dura, Poet Head and others. Many articles on Oliver Sachs, Doris Lessing, Virginia Woolf, and many others. Twenty years in Spain with friends who lived through the worst of Franco. I was in Spain (Granada, Conil and Cádiz) during Franco’s rule, there the day of his death when people took to the streets in celebration. Interviewed nine major Spanish Women Novelists, including Ana María Matute and Carmen Laforet and Carmen Martín Gaite. Linda’s Amazon Page is HERE.
World as a Terror-Field
Think of those sunflower petals
Flying away so yellow in a golden light
Think of the anarchists’ red shirts
Pungent in Guadalajara, overt and blood-drenched,
Think of you this sunny morning receiving a spam email
Threatening to contaminate your whole house with Coronavirus.
There is no safe place anymore to dream of La La Land.
We can be reached anywhere and pulled and tugged,
Unhinged even from the safety of our soul.
I think of Virginia Woolf having coffee, her mind,
Measuring the world of decades, stirring the sugar in her coffee.
It’s as though her mind-place reached around the world.
At a glance, with her word nest intact.
Now, we are within walls polished so transparent,
Our souls close like an x-ray’s light, all seen into.
There’s a terror of no intimacy, leaking passwords and invasive viruses.
Megabytes of someone else’s knowing
When all we need is what we know
Curse those who disparage the robin
Plucking away, the stalwart bluejay.
Curse those who say we don’t matter
Anyway, any way.
Rebels everywhere
This talk of corpses likely to be,
These flat charts with hollow corporate names
Remind me of the 50s when people popped into mushroom clouds.
Those consonant-heavy names Malenkov, Andropov, Chernenko
and Stalin loomed large in unseeing brutality.
This was a time for the feminine way,
a time for pockets of air and lavender,
That way to reach between things, to slither love
like Dickinson finding new feet for poems
to say what wasn’t said, for Emily Bronte to
take love out of bounds.
While HUAC measured people as
stones and lashed at pinkos
I voraciously read of rebels everywhere,
Those who spoke for something
I found latent
In my sick little-girl heart.
Death into this spring
Spring finds us speechless
to say, to say how terror is,
how death turns our head.
We’ve been used to letting life go by without us.
I breathe hard for life with addled lungs.
After all, we are life, all there is of it.
Now in the heart of growth,
death is climbing hard
toward us all over.
Now, we have to stand out in the balance
and ring our life for living,
jump and plunge
over the edge into what comes next.
Quick the blue iris is coming
And the red peonies
And all your wonderful life.
LINDA E. CHOWN grew up in Berkeley, Ca. in the days of action. Civil Rights arrests at Sheraton Palace and Auto Row. BA UC Berkeley Intellectual History; MA Creative Writing SFSU; PHd Comparative Literature University of Washington. Four books of poetry. Many poems published on line at Numero Cinq, Empty Mirror, The Bezine, Dura, Poet Head and others. Many articles on Oliver Sachs, Doris Lessing, Virginia Woolf, and many others. Twenty years in Spain with friends who lived through the worst of Franco. I was in Spain (Granada, Conil and Cádiz) during Franco’s rule, there the day of his death when people took to the streets in celebration. Interviewed nine major Spanish Women Novelists, including Ana María Matute and Carmen Laforet and Carmen Martín Gaite.
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