News from the Muse

 The Muse of Lament and Dissent  III

Weeping Madonna
(with credit to Sara Spaulding Phillips)

Introduction 

An Agony of Witness and Empathy

I release you, my beautiful and terrible
fear. I release you. I release you. You were my beloved
and hated twin. But now, I don’t know you
as myself.

—Joy Harjo “I Give You Back”

Weaving Sundown in a Scarlet Light

If you are an American who pays attention to the news, July 2025 has brought a chaos of terror and grief, and an agony of witness and empathy. July 4th brought the signing of the Big Bad Bill, which cut Medicaid for poor people in order to lower taxes for the rich. To witness the slashing and burning of institutions that have supported our American way of life for decades, is to grieve for the world as we’ve known it. To witness hardworking immigrants, who pick our fruit and vegetables, build our houses, tend our gardens, serve us in restaurants and hotels, take care of us in old age, live in terror of being snatched out of their lives and families by masked secret police, without IDs or due process, brings tears of empathy and bursts of rage. How did America, the land of the free, morph into such a hell realm?

To witness civil servants, who have worked for the government for many years, on whom we have depended for help with Social Security, Health, Education, Homeland Security, Emergency Assistance, be fired, or live in terror of being fired, arouses our empathy and horror. Who stole our government and its agencies from us—our access to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness?

To witness the humiliation of great universities, attacked for allowing their students to gather and speak freely, takes many of us back to our own student days, when we demonstrated for Free Speech. Many schools have had their scientific research funds withdrawn as punishment-- for whom? That is a blow to the health and wellbeing of every American, who, should they fall ill, will not be able to benefit from the latest medical advances. 

Who will be held responsible for the monstrosity our country has become in just six months of the Berserker’s reign of terror?

Enter the ghost of Jeffrey Epstein. Is this some sort of Deus Ex Machina? An act of God intent on haunting the Berserker and his minions? The Man of Teflon seems unable to shake the dirty secret of his long association with a pedophile—a trafficker of young girls and women--sexual prey for rich and powerful men. The ghosts of some of those women, who died before their time, are wailing in the Underworld, seeking to rouse those of us who will listen. Their souls require our witness and our empathy.

Commentary on the Poem: Unease Listening to my Guide in Tallinn

The edgy title of Virginia Chen’s wide ranging and penetrating poem sets the reader up for the discomfort of facing difficult truths. Those truths come in two voices, speaking from very different histories and lands. We begin in Tallinn, the capitol of Estonia, where a tour guide lectures the visitors about a history unknown to most Americans--his country’s struggle with Russian Tsars, and how that tiny country prevailed: One million Estonians sang against the Soviets day and night.

The guide scolds the tourists from the West for being afraid to “stand up for freedom” and warns: Do nothing and you will lose everything.

The second voice is that of the poem’s speaker, a “traveler for forty years,” as, back in an America changed drastically by a new administration, she struggles with what has become of her country. Married to the birthright son of parents born in China, she comes home to the shock of seeing immigrants being “arrested by agents wearing masks.” She wonders about her husband’s safety, about her own standing—her grandparents came from Europe. In a powerful leap that takes us beyond “unease,” the speaker’s blood pressure rises, sending her to the emergency room. She sums up her medical crisis deftly: American rage gave me the political bends.

She makes an astute psychological assessment of the land of her birth: We have no ancient enemy outside ourself.

Which means, one gathers, that we are doomed to project our shadow on an enemy within. But, being a traveler, who has learned courage from her Estonian tour guide’s lecture, the speaker ends her poem:

I sing in praise of singing for our rights and freedoms
unsafe though it is.

May the wisdom she has brought back from Eastern Europe inspire our American struggle against our own would-be Tsar.

Unease Listening to My Guide in Tallinn

by Virginia Chen

Tallinn

The sun is decorative. It doesn’t warm and the wind is blowing.

Our borders are closed to Russians.
Tsar Putin wants all of Europe.
Just wait. He will take.

Russia on the Globe    vs   Estonia on the Globe

Kyiv was once the Russian capital. Ukraine kicked out the old Tsar.
He moved to a swamp—St. Petersburg.
We’re getting ready for a fight. Northern Europe is building up

its military —NATO will help us.
Not the U.S.
They can’t decide which side they’re on.

The West is afraid to stand up for freedom.
They’re scared of nukes. Retribution.
Do nothing and you will lose everything.

Peter the Great, Tsar of Russia

Naïve leaders think they can make a deal with a Tsar.
For 500 years, Russian Tsars and Soviets tried to annex the Baltics.
Russians took us over. Then the Nazis. Then the Soviets. We fought back.

We’ve held off the Russians since 1990s when we got
independence by singing. That’s right.
One million Estonians sang against the Soviets day and night.

Estonian Women Singing Against the Soviets

We were lucky.
Not a drop of blood.

Russians don’t travel. Don’t know how others live. We Americans don’t travel that much either. When I’m asked about traveling, I’m careful

not to say much. People here are easily bored. Some are listening for what tribe I belong
to. I did not buy a “Greenland is not for sale T-shirt” in Nuuk, I bought a deep blue one

that was a map of the Fjords. Think climate. Thawing permafrost.
I’ve been traveling for over forty years. This time I came home to riots in LA.

Masked Ice Agents Arresting Immigrants

Immigrants are being arrested by agents wearing masks. Some detainees are sent to prisons in Central America, Cuba and Africa. Americans voted for this.

My husband’s parents were born in China. They had Boxer Rebellion scholarships to medical school in the U.S. They became naturalized citizens.

Becoming Naturalized Citizens

They hated the communists. Couldn’t go back home. Will Americans whose parents were born in China be targeted next? Like the American Japanese during WW II?

My husband was born in Indiana. I spent my whole life in California. My grandparents were born in Europe. I love the Dutch and Swiss but my home is in the U.S. 

I was home a week when my blood pressure rose. I went to the emergency room feeling like the salmon who couldn’t readjust in the brackish waters of home after living at sea. 

Sockeye Salmon

Tests showed a possible blood clot from the long flight. They let me go after they factored in my
age. American rage gave me the political bends. I don’t feel at home swimming 

in hostile waters. My home has the mightiest military in the world.
But—we have no ancient enemy outside ourselves. We’re only 250 years old.

I sing in praise of travel.
I sing in praise of singing for our rights and freedoms
unsafe though it is.

No Kings Demonstrations

Besides travel, Virginia Chen spent most of her life singing in choruses. She loves the idea of people singing together in religious congregations, community choruses, and other gatherings big and small. She cherishes the experience of singing with people from different backgrounds and cultures to make beautiful music—not war. When things are bad or good, we sing.

News from the Muse

The Muse of Lament and Dissent

Introduction

We heard it.
The racket in every corner of the world. As
the hunger for war rose up in those who would steal to be
    president
to be king or emperor, to own the trees, stones, and everything
else that moved around the earth, inside the earth
and above it. —Joy Harjo

                                            “When the World As We Knew It Ended”
                                                    Weaving Sundown in a Scarlet Light pp. 49-50

Sara Spaulding-Phillips

Since the “Orange Man” began his tricky and treacherous reign, the Muse of Lament and Dissent has been causing a ruckus in the poetry circle I lead--Deep River—a public program for the San Francisco Jung Institute. We read great poets and write under their influence. Thankfully, we spent our last three months of this year’s cycle with Joy Harjo, who has shown us, brilliantly, how to engage in dissent and lament, in political poems that speak out of Indigenous consciousness—out of love and concern for our Mother the Earth and all her creatures.

As poets, our mode of expression is verse. So I’ve invited the poets of Deep River to give voice to their Lament and Dissent through writing political poems. The Sister from Below has graciously agreed to publish a series of these poems.

Our first poet, Maureen Wolf, gives us “Breaking News.” This powerful poem loops and spins from the NYTimes to the colorful changes spring creates in the foothills, to the myth of Demeter and Persephone, to the horrors of a Hades in El Salvador, where hapless immigrant men are held with “Trumped up” charges and without due process. In lithe poetic leaps Wolf carries us off to Ukraine, to children’s paintings of rising waters, to her Irish grandmother as she prays for her sons at war in the war to end all wars, back to the “riot” of Nature in spring, to the song in the mouth of a Stag at Easter and the Raven’s raspy voice, which even the Orange Man can’t stop.

Breaking News

        by Maureen Wolf

“Guernica” Picasso - ARAS Online

News from the NY Times: not much has changed;

the world is still riding the roller coaster of the

Orange man’s policies

dipping, looping, spinning beyond the rule of law.

“Pink Peach Trees” Van Gogh -
ARAS Online

But then maybe everything has changed.

It is spring: pops of orange, blue and white

speckle the green grass of the foothills populated

with scrub oaks, grazing cattle and the confidence of Nature.

“Demeter and Kore” - ARAS Online

Spring won’t last long here: the gentle warmth of spring sun will change

quickly. The lupine, the paint brush, the shooting stars will shrivel

and the grass will brown and the air will become heavy and oppressive

under the summer sun. Remembering the scorched earth,

I wonder if Demeter has lost her bargain with Hades.

“Wailing Female Mourner”
Yeats - ARAS Online

Haven’t we all?
Aren’t we all waiting for the long winter days of the centuries to end,
Wondering when Persephone will push through

the hard pan clay of the human heart.

“Death in the Afternoon” Yeats - ARAS Online

This spring I can hear the echo of Abel’s scream as the cell door clangs behind

Neri Jose Alvarado, Andry Hernandez-Romero, Kilmar Agrego Garcia and

more in the Terroism Confinement Center in El Salvador. Trumped up stories,

no evidence, no trials. The Orange Man and Nayib Bukele casting lots.

Not long after, I learn of a Ukrainian woman nearing her hundredth birthday,

living alone in an apartment which is miraculously standing in Zaporizhzhia—

with no electricity, no heat, thimbles of food brought by her niece

when bombs aren’t falling--who stays three more days in hospital,

not for medical reasons, but to visit friends.

Hour Glass Drawing by child

I imagine a broken table in the hospital ward where the crones have tea

and grieve for the soldiers they once suckled at their breasts and talk

of the images their great grandchildren paint, images of a child standing

on the roof of home surrounded by rising water, of earth in an hourglass.

Scrawled in a child’s hand: No more planet.

“Weeping Madonna”
Sara Spaulding Phillips

I hear them singing Bozhe Velykyi and Mariye Maty Bozha prayers for protection,

prayers of supplication. I hear my Irish grandmother praying for thirty days

until her sons come home from the war after the war to end all wars.

Prayers to Mary. Prayers to Demeter. Prayers to Gaia.

“Stag and Moon” pixabay

The songs are carried in the mouth of a Stag to me on Easter morning. When I watch

the pinks and blues of the eastern sky gently pull back the curtain of night, I hear

the raven’s raspy voice greet the sun and see the crown headed sparrow search

for seeds and know the confidence of Nature.

“In Shoreham Garden” Palmer
ARAS Online

The Orange Man cannot pen an order stopping the riot of Spring from hearts on fire.

But as the Stag, and the raven, the sparrow and the crones have sung to me

to be consumed by fire means leaving so much of me behind. The path to the Other

winds through the path hidden in plain sight.

"My Nurse and I" - ARAS Online

Artist’s Statement

For several years I had eyed Naomi’s Deep River workshop in the CG Jung Institute of San Francisco program brochure. In 2019, I attended a conference on the Other at the Institute where Naomi was presenting. I spoke with her briefly about my interest in Deep River but also of my hesitation. I found understanding the works of most poets a mystery. Naomi said something to the effect of “Jump in.”

 

Nearly five years later, I jumped into Deep River. During this past year we wrote “under the influence” of three poets dislocated from the land of their birth. In these turbulent times in the States, I too have felt dislocated. Deep River became the place where I could explore and give voice to my exile. I am grateful to Naomi for providing a place and for her enthusiastic greeting of my fledging poems. I am grateful for the Deep River poets for their warm embrace of me and, especially, of my work. Over the years, I have collected several degrees. I am a psychotherapist and live with Ruby, a dislocated husky, in Fresno, California in the Central Valley, the doorway to the Sierra Nevada. 

—Maureen Wolf

June 14th No Kings Day of Defiance

If you are feeling a need to express your own lament and dissent about the state of our country, we urge you to join Indivisible’s demonstrations on June 14th—A Day of Defiance.

News from the Muse

News from the Muse

of Revolution 

“Hope” is the thing with feathers—that perches in the soul—

—Emily Dickinson

Sister from Below: Cover
Painting by Bianca Dalder

What’s Happened to the Sister from Below?

If you follow the Sister from Below’s News from the Muse you may wonder what’s become of her. I’ll tell you what: the November 2024 Election, and since the January Inauguration, the onslaught of bedlam and chaos in the crazed fists of a Berserker President. The Sister from Below has been silenced. Struck dumb. The breath of inspiration knocked out of her. She, my connection to Soul, to deep Self, has withdrawn to a dark cave, to keen, to howl, to moan. She’s brought me no wisdom, no glowing intuitions from the depths, only nightmares about stormy weather. 

Kamala & Tim

Gone, gone the joyous dance of Kamala Devi Harris & Tim Walz, in whose vision of America women are free to choose, workers are paid livable wages, Mother Earth is honored and protected. Gone gone the feathered thing called Hope. Now we’re in a story of total devastation. The Robber Baron crew has showed up with their chain saws, to fell every tree our ancestors planted—the habitat for feathered creatures and their songs. 

But then, one night, I had a dream which changed everything. The Sister from Below showed up in the form of Diane di Prima, my late, long ago poetry teacher, demanding I write a revolutionary rant. That dream evoked memories of a difficult mentorship. It woke The Sister from Below to the inspiration of the Muse of Revolution and to the necessity of political rants. She gave me this poem to pass on to you. And she asks, if you are so inclined, that you pass it on to others in need of inspiration.

Diane di Prima

A Revolutionary Letter

to the Spirit of Diane di Prima

Revolution: a turning, as the earth
turns, among planets, as the sun
turns. . .  

                               we turn. . . 
faces of pain and fear, the dawn
awash among them
—Diane di Prima

You came to my dream last night    Diane
like a Zen slap    your fierce spirit hell bent    on waking
me up    rousing me to write    a roaring rant
for these terrible times    you find me in    You
who were my poetry teacher    decades ago    You
whose lineage    is my lineage    Blake    H.D.
The Black Mountain Poets    Your own wild Loba    You 

usher me up a steep staircase    to your garret    a word 

whose root means watchtower    You who believed
there is gold    deep in the roots of words    You
        whose creed was    a poet must always be    on the watch

White Wolf Fantasy

Remember the first time I came to you?    wearing a flouncy
gypsy skirt    so femme    beside your tattered Beat poet jeans
I was scared    for I had given you the power    to dub me poet
or dud    Back in the day    at a demonstration against The War
I’d heard you read    Revolutionary Letters    I was smitten    you
who mingled the lyrical    & the political    (forbidden to an English
major)    called to me    like a Muse    Turns out my lucky stars
had unexpected plans for me    an esoteric path you walked
me down    to the roots of Poetry’s Tree of Life    in the Spirit
of the Depths    in the Lunar Realms    of Magick    Tarot
                                       Kabbala Alchemy Mythology Dreams

Wm. Turner Angel Standing in the sun

I watched you being brilliant    fierce    tongue-lashing nasty

You scared me    just as my Father had    & yet I stayed
in your circle    in the spell of your Magick    long enough
to become the poet I am    whose Muse insists    on mingling
the esoteric    the lyrical    & the political    Your lineage
is my lineage    At the cusp of the pandemic    I learned 

you’d left your body    & now here you are   in my dream

insisting I remember   who I am   the first-born birth right baby   

of refugee Jews from the Shoah   reliving the very catastrophe   

into which I was born     I used to believe   never again

would such an atrocity   assault us     

The holy wind’s been knocked out   of my Muse  

My Goddess has retreated    to the underworld    

Your spirit demands    that I tell it   as I see it   

                  the whole cruel scourge   of our passion play

He has come    who sees himself as savior    creator

of a Golden Age    whose given name means    

Ruler of the World    Sea Monster from the Depths 

I prefer to call him    Berserker    You say that hardly
does him justice    The truth is that he stinks
He is corrupt    his guts rotting    in Big Mac Sauce
His Doppelganger    who does his dirty work
his little boy    as a shield against assassination    He wields
a jubilant chain saw    to cut & slash    the Civil Service
to rend asunder    the bonds that bind our land    Diane
is that you chanting    the Declaration of Independence?

Lady Liberty Weeping

Whenever any form of government becomes destructive
of our rights    to Life    Liberty    and the Pursuit
of Happiness    It is the Right of the People    to abolish it

He has ridden roughshod    over the Constitution
He has tossed landmines at clinics that serve    wounded veterans
He has swindled the working classes    to cut taxes for the rich
He has eviscerated truth    violated due process
disobeyed judges    ripped peaceful legal immigrants
out of their lives    O monstrous chaos agents
wreckers of law    & community    You who believe
that empathy is a sin    a feminine weakness
like helping a stranger    like feeding a starving child
like calling out    cruelty & bigotry    Be careful

Our Goddess has arisen    from her underworld meat hook
She who is a love Goddess    a warrior Goddess    a flood
& fire Goddess    for whom earth & sky sing
                is in a holy fury    about this desecration &    She’s Woke!

The Goddess Durga: Photo by Subhrajyoti

News from the Muse

The Muse of Lament and Dissent

invites you to a Poetry Reading on Zoom

Naomi Ruth Lowinsky 

will read from her 6th poetry collection

Your Face in the Fire

Blue Light at the Gallery

Friday, Jan. 10, 2025 6pm Pacific Time

7pm Mountain Time 8 pm Central Time 9 pm Eastern Time

                                                                        Though the weather’s becoming
                                        a banshee goddess     Though the “white only” nation
                                        is trolling the web     Though the emperor-elect
                                        is tweeting our downfall     My wish is     Remember
                                        The way of women     is our way     The moon swells
                                        the moon goes dark     pulling the tides     in and out
                                        The way of trees     is our way     So raise up
                                        your branches     sisters     for we are one     gathering
                                        Soon sap     will rise     apple trees flower

                                        We’ll weave us a canopy     all over this land
                                        It will be uprising time     once again
                                                                                    in America

                                                                            from “Wishing in the Woods with Hillary”
                                                                                      in Your Face in the Fire

Two Women Under the Tree in the Garden - Edvard Munch 

Request your Zoom link at bluelightpress@aol.com

For a signed copy of Your Face in the Fire

Send request, name and address to danielsafran@yahoo.com

($25.00 via PayPal--nlowsky@hotmail.com--includes shipping and handling)  

The Sister from Below is delighted to announce the publication of

Your Face in the Fire

Launch Date: June 1, 2024

Watch this blog for more information

* * * *

News from the Muse of the Double-headed Axe*

*The Double-Headed Axe or labrys was sacred as a tool and a weapon. It belonged to the Minoan
Goddess. It is associated with the labyrinth—“house of the double axe.”

Roi Faineant

an online literary publication

has published four of Naomi Ruth Lowinsky’s recent poems.

It is difficult to find literary magazines which will publish long poems, and/or poems that take on the difficult issues of our terrible times. Hats off to the editors of this brave publication. You can find all four poems here:

The Muse of the Double-headed Axe

insists on sharing Her poem, below.

Labyrinth

Pilgrimage in the Shape of a Prayer

I.
You never know    where    you’re going
                                                until you get there
You never know    what    you’ll stumble into
                                                until you’re in it
so said the Labyrinth       one afternoon
                                                in late November
as your feet faltered     round the sudden     twists and turns
                                                 of the double-headed ax
When at last    you emerged    from that pilgrimage
                                            in the shape of a prayer
ruby red and gold trees    flared up    into a glory
                                            and you suddenly remembered    the Dream


II.
The Dream knows you    are a wandering Jew
whose bones ache    with the agony weight
of the world    forever    seeking sanctuary
forever    on a pilgrimage    in the shape of a prayer
you stumble    into    a small    Black Hole    A temple?
A trap?    A desecration of the Holy Land?    Can’t see a thing
but the bony labyrinth    of your ear hears    demonic chanting
bibinetanyahubibinetanyahubibnetanyahu
The One and the Only    Mr Security
The One and the Only    Judge and Jury
rousing your ancestors    to warn you
This double-headed ax blow    to the stomach
this manic metronome    with its hypnotic spell
means to render you    powerless    or is it
a call to witness    how swiftly sanctuary
                                                can turn    treacherous?

Nova Music Festival

Hostages

III.
The Dream knows you    will stumble
    into this damp and gloomy     spider web of tunnels
        a double-headed ax    a labyrinth of passageways
            You walk    with the walkers    who can’t see
                                                    you    seem to be    a spirit    in this underworld
                You come at last    to a well-lit room
                    a group of young people    wounded    bandaged
                        dazed    confused    held prisoner
                            Are you called to witness    the abducted?
                        Are you called to hear    what they remember?
                     Just yesterday    they were ecstatic    trance dancers
                a synchronized flow    of mandalas    within mandalas
            spheres beyond spheres    in the company    of Great Buddha
        on a pilgrimage    in the shape of a prayer    for peace    for joy
    between Jews and Muslims    loving the land they share    all day
all night    in the desert    until suddenly    at sunrise    Nirvana cracks

    gun shots    hand grenades    terrorists are hunting them    running
        running    weeping     shrieking    corpses scattered    everywhere
            and they    the survivors    abducted
                Where was the army?    We served our time
                    We would have saved us    Now we’re stuck
                        in this hell hole    without our phones
                            How can we text    our terrified mothers?
                                What would Buddha say?

Destruction in Gaza

Eye and Child

IV.
The Dream transports you stumbling    into a temple    or is it a mosque by the sea?    The Dream
shows you    the spirit of a girl who reveals    I am the “Unknown Trauma Child” of Gaza
Did anyone survive under the rubble that terrible night   when the bomb crashed into our home
like a double-headed ax?    All I could hear was    shrieking    shrieking    Then nothing a tunnel
of darkness    a sudden bright light    as the ancestors gathered    fragments of my soul
so I can visit with you    in your dream    so you can see me whole    a radiant loving child
of radiant loving people    May they come to me    as ghosts who walk the labyrinth
a pilgrimage    in the shape of a prayer    May you greet them    here in this sanctuary
made sacred by your sorrow    Sit with us    Meet my mother who was tender    Meet my father
who was playful    Meet my older brother    the joker    Meet my younger sister    the dreamer
and that unknown unborn one  in mother’s womb  who never will see   the light  of the new day
This is my family   broken pottery  shattered lineage  cast away flesh and bones  No one is left
to identify   our bodies   No one is left   to grieve   May you be our witness   our weeper
                                                                                     May you gather  and treasure  our souls

Underworld

V.

The Dream knows   you are weary                still stumbling   on difficult terrain
    This pilgrimage  in the shape of a prayer    has not yet revealed the  Temple of your Soul
        The Dream is a labyrinth   in motion            in the shape of a butterfly
            in the shape of a double-headed ax              it cuts through tumult  and you find yourself
                ascending a Rock   given a hand up            by kind people   who know   sorrow
            “This Rock”   they tell you                       “is our Sanctuary   without walls
           where all who love this land                call it Palestine  call it Israel  may gather to pray
        that the Rock will hold us   know us     help us face   the hard truth   of our history
    the hard truth   of our geography           the hard truth   of our kinship   in catastrophe
        We bring prayer rugs   and prayer shawls       We prostrate ourselves   we daven

We’ve come to hear    the Stone speak”

I am the voice    of the land you love

Hear O Israel    Hear O Palestine

I am your Mother

I say    “Enough Already!

Salaam is Sholom    Sholom is Salaam

Make Peace!”

Sacred Rock