The Yom Kippur Muse

The spirit of the depths forced me to speak to my soul, to call upon her as a living and self-existing being. I had to become aware that I had lost my soul.

C.G. Jung in The Red Book

When the deepening, darkening undertow of fall begins to tug at me -weather shifts, days shorten, summer fruits fade, melancholy wanders into the garden- my soul sits me down for a reckoning. Though I don’t participate in organized Jewish High Holiday observances, I feel the power of this holiest time in the Jewish year in my bones, and my soul requires me to give her some serious sacred time at Yom Kippur.

My soul is a shape shifter. She comes to me as Muse, as Sister from Below, as guardian angel checking to see what I’ve done with the life I’ve been given. She shows up as ancestor, demanding my poems and my memories. She comes as the Spirit of the Times, filling me with terrors and enthusiasms -the economy, the environment, the Tea Party, the Arab Spring, and bless them that breath of fresh air brought us by the occupiers of Wall Street.

My soul is the Spirit of the Depths, come to remind me that I need “the life of eternity” as Jung says. I am required “to speak to my soul as to something far off and unknown which did not exist through me, but through whom I exist.” Jung again, in the Red Book.

So, at this time of year I set a day aside to honor a reality greater than the everyday. It is a time of reckoning, of accounting for myself, of sorting through the stuff of my life, separating what’s essential from what’s not. Trouble is -there’s so much stuff. Some of it is piled on the floor of my study. Some of it is written in my calendar. Some of it is in too many e-mails. There’s outer world stuff and inner world stuff. The latter shows up in my journals- where poems begin, where I reflect on the raw stuff of my life, wrestle with dreams, talk to my soul in her many forms. I sort through my relationships -those I love and serve- am I doing right by them? Trouble is, so much in my life is of the essence, feels urgent, needs to be tended, written, worked through, spoken.

My friend Leah says, ”Here we are in our late sixties, still fruiting.” It’s a big job, fruiting, harvesting, bringing to market one’s late life work. And yet, how blessed I am, how grateful, to have so much life stirring in me.


In Jewish folklore it is said that Lailah, the angel of conception, a guardian angel who watches over us in our mother’s wombs, who teaches all the mysteries, reveals to us our essential nature, and, just before we’re born, lays her finger over our mouths to seal in all the secrets we then spend our lives uncovering. That’s why we all have an indentation on our upper lip.

At Yom Kippur I have a frank discussion with Lailah. Am I living my life in harmony with my true nature? Am I living my life in harmony with Mother Nature? We all struggle with these issues. These themes came together in a poem, which I offer you for this Yom Kippur.


LAILAH WANTS A WORD

Lailah, the Angel of Conception…watches
over the unborn child.
Jewish Legend

You were not born for traffic
Not released into day for hustle

and drive. I did not send you past moonstone
past glow worm, to ignore the light. I did not touch

the soft spot on your crown, nor seal
my blessing on your upper lip, to be a slave

to acquisition. I sent you into the company
of frogs. I sent you to commune with willows

with oaks. Pay attention—
the frogs have stopped wooing

the oaks been sold down river
Grandmother Spider Brother Rabbit

are losing their worlds. You have ears —
Hear them. You have a heart—feel them

You have two lungs—breathe
I give you the wind

in the grasses. I give you the sight
of Coyote. She’s meandering up

the mountain. Follow her. Perhaps she will throw
your shoe at the moon. Perhaps the moon

will fill your shoe with shimmer—
Sail it back down to you—Then

will you remember
Me?

(First published on line at poetsforlivingwaters)

The Muse of Unexpected Memories

The Story Behind the Poem

One of Poetry’s many gifts is the sudden associative leap that opens the door to a forgotten room in your soul, one full of meaning and memory. I had not expected Adlai Stevenson to show up in my poem. There he was, my schoolgirl crush. You’ve lived a good long time if you remember Adlai Stevenson. He ran for president in 1952 and 1956. Could a man with a bald spot and a hole in his shoe run for President today?

What did he mean to me, age 9, age 13? When I saw his face, when I heard his voice, something settled down in my body. I felt safe. As the American born child of Jewish refugees from Hitler, feeling safe was not familiar. But Adlai Stevenson felt like kin. He stood for an America in which I could feel at home. Stevenson was my good American father -urbane, sophisticated, witty, eloquent and liberal. Unlike my own father, who was also urbane, sophisticated, witty, eloquent and liberal, I never heard Stevenson fly into a German rage because I’d played a wrong note on the piano. What I heard him say was:

There are men among us who use ‘patriotism’ as a club for attacking other Americans. What can we say for the self-styled patriot who thinks that a Negro, a Jew, a Catholic, or a Japanese-American is less American than he? That he betrays the deepest article of our faith, the belief in individual liberty and equality which has always been the heart and soul of the American idea.

(He said this in 1952, addressing the American Legion in Madison Square Garden.) All we have to do to make that statement current is add “Muslim” and “immigrant” to the list of groups that suffer prejudice.

Stevenson was ridiculed in his time for his indecisive aristocratic air. (Sound familiar, Barack?) He was labeled an egghead. Young as I was, I knew I was an egghead, that my family and friends were eggheads, that I would spend my life among eggheads. I loved it when Stevenson said: "Eggheads of the world unite, you have nothing to lose but your yolks." Spoken like a poet! No wonder I adored him.

A supporter told him that he was sure to get the vote of “every thinking” person in the U.S., to which Stevenson replied, “Thank you, but I need a majority to win.”

Stevenson was a man of moral courage and wisdom. In accepting the nomination of the Democratic Party in 1952 he said:

“Our troubles are ahead of us. Some will call us appeasers; others will say we are the War Party. Some will say we are reactionary; others will say we stand for socialism. There will be...the inevitable cries of ‘Throw the rascals out,’ ‘It’s time for a change,’ and so on and so on.”

Obama could say those very words today.

So much has changed and so much remains the same. The kinship I felt as a girl, for Adlai Stevenson, was matched by no one until Barack Obama arrived on the national stage: urbane, sophisticated, witty, eloquent and liberal, though some would argue with that last adjective. Something settles down in my body when I hear our President speak. His intelligence, his vision, his ability to contain great complexity, makes him kin. I hope he is aware of Adlai Stevenson as an ancestor.

Of course, Stevenson lost two elections. He did not face the impossible task of transforming his vision into political reality. He wasn’t given the opportunity to disappoint and disillusion us. He was not tested as Barack Obama is being tested today. And the safety I felt in Stevenson’s aura did not last. The hateful vitriol of the House Un-American Activities Committee, it’s vicious attack on the livelihoods of eggheads, artists, intellectuals, people who were my kin, and the ugliness of those cross-burning racist murderers, the Ku Klux Klan and their ilk, took over center stage in the country, and in my haunted heart. And today there is a new brand of vitriol, hatred, nastiness in our politics.

But Barack, difficult as this time is for you, for all of us who admire and support you, I think these words from Stevenson’s 1952 acceptance speech are good advice from your remarkable forerunner:

Let’s talk sense to the American people. Let’s tell them the truth, that there are no gains without pains...that we are now on the eve of great decisions, not easy decisions, like resistance when you’re attacked, but a long, patient, costly struggle which alone can assure triumph over the great enemies of man -war, poverty and tyranny- and the assaults upon human dignity which are the most grievous consequences of each....

The people are wise, wiser than the Republicans think. And the Democratic Party is the people’s Party -not the labor Party, not the farmer’s Party, not the employer’s Party-it is the Party...of everyone.

And Barack, there is just one more quote I want you to hold in your heart, as you go around the country talking sense to the American people. Stevenson spoke of our fragile planet in a speech before the United Nations Economic and Social Council in Geneva, Switzerland in 1965, the year of his death. He said:

We travel together, passengers on a little space ship, dependent on its vulnerable reserve of air and soil; all committed for our safety to its security and peace; preserved from annihilation only by the care, the work, and I will say, the love we give our fragile craft.

The poem that opened the door to Adlai Stevenson’s place in my heart is called “When I’m Gone.” Like so many of my poems it is an elegy. I am happy it has landed in a fine on line publication, Emprise Review, in which Tracy Youngblom has written an elegant essay on elegy. Any poet who aligns her work with that of Rilke and Celan, as she does, is kin to me. I hope you’ll read the essay and check out the poems in Emprise 21.

The Terror Muse

Sometimes the muse is terrifying, arrives in a fiery crash -when towers fall, when a whole country awakes to its vulnerability. I remember that September morning as I remember the day on which Jack Kennedy was assassinated, the day on which Martin Luther King was assassinated. On Sept. 11th 2001 an essential American sense of safety was murdered.

Dan and I were waking to NPR’s “Morning Edition,” as we did most mornings, when images of planes crashing and people leaping to their deaths filled our heads. I find it hard to believe it has been ten years, hard to believe how much our world has changed.



The muse came to me in the voices of those whose lives were extinguished that day. I wrote a pantoum -a form in which lines are repeated- to give voice to the dead on both sides of the terrible story. The poem, “Voices from the Ashes,” can be found in my recent collection “adagio & lamentation.




voices from the ashes

where is my body?
who brushed teeth kissed the baby made the early train?
whose spirit’s been knocked beyond breath?
whose soul keeps running down a gone stairwell?

who brushed teeth kissed the baby made the early train?
whose burning heart whose exploding lungs?
whose soul keeps running down the gone stairwell?
where are my bones?

whose burning heart whose exploding lungs?
who wanders streets shows strangers your smiling blown up photograph?
where are your bones?
take my blood its all I have to give

who wanders streets shows strangers your smiling blown up photograph?
whose hole whose holy whose ground zero?
take my blood its all I have to give
watch my red life stream into vials and vials

whose hole whose holy whose ground zero?
I give you the life you stunted bombed in Baghdad made a prisoner of Sharon
watch my red life stream into vials and vials
for I with only a box knife have brought your towers down

I give you the life you stunted bombed in Baghdad made a prisoner of Sharon
I have crashed your Pentagon I am David I am Geburah
for I with only a box knife have brought your towers down
I am your nightmare I poison your waters I blow up your bridges

I have crashed your Pentagon I am David I am Geburah
you the high and mighty carry buckets sift through rubble
I am your nightmare I poison your waters I blow up your bridges
steel has melted buildings keep burning all is sulphur

you the high and mighty carry buckets sift through rubble
we come from the same story your Abraham is my Ibraham
steel has melted buildings keep burning all is sulphur
your ashes are my ashes

we come from the same story your Abraham is my Ibraham
the veil is ripped Azazel has his day
your ashes are my ashes
where is the angel Raphael healer of wounds?

the veil is ripped Azazel has his day
where is your body?
where is the angel Raphael healer of wounds?
whose spirit’s been knocked beyond breath?

(First published in Psychological Perspectives)

Golden Nails by Jane Downs

I was very pleased to see Jane Downs' sensitive review of adagio and lamentation in the August 2011 edition of Poetry Flash and want to share it with you. Jane is a Bay Area poet and partner in Red Berry Editions. Her work has won prizes and appeared in numerous journals. Her novel, The Sleeping Wall, was a finalist in the Chiasmus Press book contest. She recently published a handmade chapbook, The Weight of Pink Peonies.


Golden Nails by Jane Downs

Naomi Ruth Lowinsky was born to parents who escaped Nazi Germany where many of her family perished. In adagio & lamentation, Lowinsky explores the abiding effects of this history on her family. The living move out of the darkness of the Holocaust to lives in America where the threads of loss and solace, past and present are intricately and forever woven together. Lowinsky's lyricism brings us into a consciousness that is scarred by a past that also "stun(s) her with joy."

The book's opening poem invokes Oma, the ghost of her artist grandmother who was her only surviving grandparent:

Oma come visit me sit at your easel as you always did

your brush poised your eyes as fierce

as a tiger's show me how to create

the luminous moment among so many shades



These few lines introduce Lowinsky's theme of transformation and redemption through the creation of art. Her eyes, like Oma's, are as fierce as a tiger's. Lowinsky's gaze is resolute. Her refusal to look away from the devastation of the past and the realities of fear and dislocation provides the impetus for her own art making, using a pen and ink instead of a brush and paint. Her poems act as an invocation to resurrect the ghosts (shades) of the past—to bring all that surrounds them into an instant of insight. In the title villanelle Lowinsky writes:

and my grandmother sang lieder of long ago

•••

my child's soul was full of glimmerings the glamour of the gone the glow

of candles borne by children into the dark German woods the illumination

of the evergreen all this I saw and more when my father's fierce fingers made Bach flow

•••

long gone now my grandmother my father although

sometimes I call them back by villanelle by incantation

come my fierce father play for me water my soul in Bach's flow

sing my sad grandmother your song is my covenant with long ago


Fierceness is a requirement of art making. Through art, Lowinsky traverses time and place. Art conjures up the ghosts of family and cultural history. The music of Bach leads a young Lowinsky into the "valley of the shadow" towards the world of her imagination where she sees "the glow/of candles borne by children into the dark German woods." The children's hands hold the future, the promise of enlightenment, the hope of the forever green. Lowinsky's grandmother's lieder presage her granddaughter's future as a poet. By the end of the poem, Lowinsky has stepped into her father's place resurrecting the past with her poetry. Her words have entered historical time, joining the timeless stream of music alongside Bach, Mozart, and Schubert.

There are poems about Lowinsky's aging, her husband, immediate family, her conflicted relationship with her scholar father who "pounded golden nails / into [her] brain." Some poems are humorous, some celebratory. The sensual always co-exists with the disembodied. The poem "summer fruit" begins with:

if joy were a taste on my tongue

it would be you

juice of the peach


Lowinsky's love for and deep connection to the women in her family runs throughout the collection. In the poem "great lake of my mother" she addresses her mother:

have I told you it's from you I've learned

endurance reflection

how pain crystallized

can create

such radiance


The poems also paint a portrait of Lowinsky the poet—a woman whose experience, imagination and artistry have culminated in this haunting and life-affirming book. The last line of the book reads: " . . . the woman remembers her notebook her pen."