5-Star Review of Adagio and Lamentation

In his May 21, 2011 Malcolm’s Round Table review, Malcolm Campbell gives Adagio and Lamentation 5 stars (out of 5) and imagines the poet working “…with a pen so sharp that it tears the paper, cutting through the desk’s polished veneer to carry ink and light deep into the primary wood.”

Campbell writes, “…the poems live and breathe on their pages, and when experienced together, comprise an ever-new song about long-ago wars, colors, shadows, moments and people…. Lowinsky’s words—written with “a flicker of serpent’s tongue in her ear”—tear through the paper-thin present and drive their way deep into the underworld of the unconscious where the inspirations of her muse are fiery, erotic, earthy, transcendent and whole.”

–Malcolm R. Campbell is the author of “The Sun Singer,” “Garden of Heaven: an Odyssey” and “Jock Stewart and the Missing Sea of Fire.”

Some Reflections on Loss and Grief on Mother’s Day

On a recent Thursday my friend Cathy and I were having lunch—as we regularly do— telling each other stories from our lives as we have done since we were girls. There was a sudden commotion across the street from the restaurant: a procession of many children and some adults had turned the corner of Alcatraz Avenue and was marching down College Avenue. They wore blood red T shirts, and carried placards that read: “Peace. Non Violence. Adam we love you.” Sad children, weeping children, adults with solemn faces. They chanted: “Adam Adam Adam. We want Peace.”

We who had marched against wars and other atrocities, we who had been washed down the steps of San Francisco’s City Hall while demonstrating against the House Un-American Activities Committee fifty years ago—when we were students at Berkeley High— watched this procession with amazement and wonder.

What was being protested?

Who was Adam?

Adam, we learned, was Adam Williams, a young man, 22 years old, who worked as an aide and mentor in Peralta Elementary School’s P.E.A.C.E. after school program. He was shot outside Sweet Jimmie’s at Jack London Square on the night after Easter—an innocent passerby during an attempted robbery. I found his photo on line—such a beautiful young man.


Cathy has a son named Adam. I have a step-son named Adam. My children and step-children, including Adam, went to Peralta in the 70s. It was a wonderful school, diverse, challenging, creative. I gather it still is. I learned from the Peralta School Website that Adam Williams went to Peralta in the 90s and that his mother has worked on the support staff for years.

I don’t know Adam Williams. But I know something about how loved he was. The children whose lives he touched, touched me with their tears, their passionate protest against his senseless death, their hand written placards. One read “Be treated as you want to be treated. Mr. Adam, I miss you.”

I don’t know Adam’s mother, but I do know something about grief. My grandmother lost her two sons when they were in their early 20s. They had gone skiing. Their young lives were buried in an avalanche. This was many years before I was born. But her grief was my companion growing up. I learned that a mother who loses her child never stops grieving, never stops remembering, needs to keep that child’s memory alive by telling the stories. I wrote about this in my book, The Motherline.

Terrible loss, sudden death, unbearable grief are part of all our Motherlines. Go back far enough in your Motherline and you’ll find children who died too young, mothers who died in childbirth, fathers killed in war or on the streets.

Cathy and I stood at the corner of College and Alcatraz in the throngs of blood red T shirts whose slogan was ”Adam’s March for Peace.” We looked at each other with tears in our eyes.

One can think of this terrible story as an example of the mysteries of fate. Or one can see it as a symptom of a violent and gun crazy culture. Either way it is unbearable.

Cathy and I know that grief is part of every mother’s experience. Whether it’s grief for your baby growing up, grief for a child who is disabled or sick, grief for an adult child who is suffering, the capacity to grieve is part of being human, part of being able to love.

This Mother’s Day make room in your reflections for mothers who have lost their children. They do not stop being mothers. Remember the mother of Adam Williams. Remember how much he was loved.

My Mother’s Hallelujah Violin

A Mother’s Day Offering

I am losing my mother in little flakes of peeling off memories. Sometimes, during our Sunday morning phone conversations, she tells me she wakes up and doesn’t know where she is. Sometimes she doesn’t know who she is.

My mother is in Chicago, in a beautiful retirement community by the lake. I am in Northern California. She forgets this. She also forgets where my children and grandchildren live. “You’re so lucky!” she exclaims, each time we have this conversation, “They’re all near you! You can see them whenever you like.” I get her meaning. It’s not easy for her that I’m so far away. It’s not easy for me.

My mother is a fine musician—a violinist and violist. She still plays chamber music regularly. “What did you play?” I wonder. “Oh, I can’t remember” she says. “But it was fun.”

I remember, just a few years ago, when my mother was in her eighties, she’d tell me proudly about her Christmas time ”gigs,” playing Handel’s Messiah in Black churches all over Chicago. I wrote a poem about how our family identified with African-American culture, “Your People Are My People.” My mother and her “Hallelujah violin” make an appearance in the poem, which was recently published in New Millennium Writings.

So mother, here’s my poem as a Mother’s Day offering to you, who have taught me so much about aging with grace and with passion for what you love. It’s dedicated to Al Young, whose poetry inspired my poem.


YOUR PEOPLE ARE MY PEOPLE
for Al Young

My people are the people of the pianoforte and the violin
Mozart people Bach people Hallelujah people
my people are the Requiem people Winterreise people Messiah people
who crossed the red sea Pharoah’s dogs at our heels

Your people are the drum beat people the field holler people the conjure people
Blues people Jubilee people people who talk straight to God
Your people are the Old Man River people the Drinking Gourd people
singing the Lord’s songs in a strange land

My family had a Sabbath ritual
We lit the candles sang Go Down Moses sang Swing Low Sweet Chariot
sang slave music freedom music secret signals in the night music
my father said you never know
when Pharoah will be back

i was young
i was American i thought
my people were the Beatles the Lovin’ Spoonful the Jefferson Airplane
singing Alice and her White Rabbit through all
those changes my parents did not understand

That didn’t last
That was leaving home music magic mushroom music
Puff the Dragon music floating off to Never Never land
now heard in elevators in the pyramids of finance

but Old Man River still rolls through my fields
Bessie Smith still sweetens my bowl
Ma Rainey appears in the inner sanctum
of the CG Jung Institute flaunting her deep black bottom

My father’s long gone over Jordan
and I’d hate for him to see
how right he was about Pharoah

but I want you to know Al

every Christmas
in black churches all over Chicago
the Messiah shows up
accompanied by my mother’s
Hallelujah violin

(Published in New Millennium Writings)


You can learn more about my mother’s life, and about the power of the mother archetype in all our lives, in my book: The Motherline: Every Woman’s Journey to Find Her Female Roots. By the way, it makes a great Mother’s Day gift.

My mother and her “Hallelujah violin.”Photo by Joan David, 2007 

A Mother’s Day Gift of Memory

My mother, past 90, is losing her memories. The other day on the phone she couldn’t remember where I was born. Was it Cuba? Was it California? She couldn’t remember how she and her family got out of Europe, in those terrible days before World War II.

My mother has given me the gift of her stories. I remember the story she told about losing two pregnancies early in her marriage. My father thought it was from walking on the beach. One more try, he told his young wife, who longed for children. I was the result of that try, born in California. I cleared the way for three more— all brothers.

All through my childhood I heard stories of how she and her German Jewish family got out of Europe. Those stories inspired my book, The Motherline, and have spilled into poems, many of them collected in my most recent collection, Adagio & Lamentation.

When I was working on the Motherline, my mother was the age I am now. She was vibrant, adventurous, traveled all over the world on her own.

She is my inspiration for growing old with grace and joy. Will I live to be the age she is now? Will I too lose my memories?

Mother, I said on the phone the other day, open your copy of the Motherline. You’ll find some of your stories there. Oh yes, she said, you did write about all that. I hope she will turn to page 169, and read about the time she, my husband Dan and I went to Germany, to see where she had lived as a child, before the family fled. The large, gracious home she remembers, in a beautiful suburb of Kassel, was gone. It had been bombed in the war, and now there was a new modern house. This is what I wrote:

The landscape of her childhood descends upon my mother and she exclaims, sighs, laughs and points. The reserve of her adult persona fades, and I can see the exuberant little girl in her. “Ach!” she exclaims, here was the school she loved. Here they walked after school. Here is where her friend, Ursula, still lives, and their dog played with the dog who lived round the corner.

“Here is the wall around the house!” She shows us a stone and iron wall. “This is the original wall! Here we hung over the edge with our bowl of cherries, spitting the pits directly into the open windows of the passing bus. I was good at it too!”

My mother (in the center), age three, with two of her sisters

The Motherline is full of women’s stories, women’s mysteries, women’s memories. Since it was published in the 90s it has inspired many women to gather their family stories, track their Motherlines, honor the lives of their mothers and grandmothers. It has recently been reissued by Fisher King Press with a beautiful new cover—a painting by Sara Spaulding Phillips. It makes a great mother’s day gift.