Lynn Strongin was born in New York, she now lives in Canada. 
Seven published books of poetry, work in thirty anthologies, fifty-five or so journals (in print & online) 
including Acton (Scotland), storie (Italy), Poetry, Shenandoah, The AMerican Voice, 
Chicago Sunday Tribune (the STates), Trace, Argotist Review (england) and Descant, 
Prism International, RAddle Moon etc( (Canada.) 

Two PEN grants, one NEA Creative Writing Grant. My anthology, The Sorrow Psalms: 
A Book of Twentieth Century ELegy will be published June, 2006, by the University of Iowa Press. 
Worked for poet Denise Levertov during the Sixties in Berkeleye.
 

 

ENUCLEATION
Removal of eyeball
takes stoicism:
the whole scraped clean, black. What Irish braggart
what Celtic
singer
would do such thing? Rafferty, I am (he sang) and blind.
Daring. My father the doctor could witness such thing. Jew.
A lapsed Protestant
a shunned Amish
woman
could not have done more meticulous
job
After polio
for years       I spent         hours
lying in cots   by a window             sitting in chair atop hills squinting 
a seeing a Celtic harp in a stained glass window:
Desires nil.    In a tunnel
of
green longing
I imagined
I swung
a teenage Michelangelo, with my green Irish eyes, a study in contradictions, torsions:
        on his wooden scaffold on precarious ropes creaking 
beneath my own Sistine.
Mother, on your deathbed your remind me of Dark Ages Britain

Celtica
because when you saw the tip of Ireland you said nothing glowed so green.

God-prints you had all over you
iron church bells
clanged & tolled time.

And I, pushing the electronic frontier
challenge myself
quarrel-hearted that I am

        how to reach you in these last late hours
        so evanescent like a page of The Book of Kells, Illuminated Manuscript of Dying





PRAYERS ON PALESTRINA STREET, Dublin

The blind child opens a sleepy eye:  Fire flashes like red fur on the oval mirror.
An old 1930’s Packard named Norman stands in first sun bright as a tuba
down South
where boys are named Jebulum.

Girls traipse to First Communion in white dresses with falling hems.

a Reader’s Digest
life
humming on the way to the Magdalena Bakery next to the laundry.

Whistling plainchant
while little things go wrong:
a lost shampoo bottle, blue plastic: a spooler broken.

Then the heart
dives
when my love, a Documents Official
explains to me it was a dedicated phone         a corrupted file
her tone like an Officer in a long forgotten Prussian war; I feel I’ve garbed life our
wrong.

I have impurities
but I’m the real McCoy
I square my shoulders   on Palestrina Street where life is no bed of roses, love no 
living doll: text, time & heaven no song.




FROST FLOWERS, Celtic Pattern

A scrim covers the brown parlor of our home             gauze over domestic affairs.:.
When the earth moves, run to the hills cry earthquake children.

I wake, scrape a layer of ice from relations:
frost flowers, eerie, geometric as Euclid, and surface.
 
Similar to those webs
broken by willow sticks
we brought down as boys. 

When the entire hockey rink is a total shield of ice under northern night,
men bring a zamboni in.

I will sigh over the blind kid closing a sleepy eye;
over the chill
layering everything     Palestrina Street, South Dublin, the pubs, the churches, the dart games:
        and turn 
        to the black glossy Steinway:
I will play pity on it & old hymns.
FLORIKA

She lived               between narrow buildings which could blot the sky
in a burning of
glitterblind wheats & rats & glass
Displaced Person s Camp Romania
little flower
elbowing thru stones,  gutter,          European rain/
face like a young Sophia Loren  winderkinde.

Documenting evidence of her brief 17 years
one finds a gold locket, a score like Mozart on the lam.

Documentary     with a tragic Irish grain:
black & white
years after she ended it all
she returns to me
collar up
cigarette cupped in the hood of both hands.