Lynn Strongin

THERE IS NO mortar for grief

THERE IS NO mortar for grief. Never. Honest, pure
sunlight thru mutins. Clinic windows. Children’s ward.
During childhood in hospital, I’d imagine: 

A Boulevard where kisses were exchanged evenings
Over the Hudson River. Polio, Long
Summer. Brandy-light. Tug boats, hot paks: join


My bridge, ethereal, trapping fireflies in 
Sun. Beginning to mortar, my mortal twelfth
Year: I’d imagine cartwheels, brook-leaps, tree-climbs:
     I’d take a shoestring to my hair: read papers:
     Tiltable fades: escarpments: imagined air.

Copyright 2022 Lynn Strongin

Bio:

Born & raised in New York City, Strongin began as a musician and emerged as a poet in the sixties in Berkeley. Nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. 12 books, work in forty anthologies, she now lived in British Columbia.

(Note; In summer 1951, a child of twelve,  I caught the polio virus. Various healings were used: one was the tiltable in which the child’s body was laid flat and tilted toward a standing position:  a few more degrees each day. My imaginary bridges, boulevards, dreamed me out of paralysis into leaping brooks as I had done the summer before.)

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