Five Poems by Carol Lipszyc

The Gymnasts

 

(from a photograph by Richard Kalvar entitled 

Somersaults-in-Long Island)

 

 

Three children on a playing field 

navigate their independence. 

 

Center back, near the chain link fence, 

a girl leaves an imprint in mid-air. 

Her legs extend to an acute-angled V of inequality.  

Tilting, she supports the weight of her lithe summer body, 

her hands unevenly planted on the grass,  

a testament to her untapped determination.  

 

To the left, a boy lands flat on his back and buttocks. 

His legs have not yet capitulated: he is holding them up in the air, 

knees bent, the soles of his feet bleached white, 

as he rebuilds his stability. 

 

To the right, near the edge of the frame, the smallest of the flock, 

lies on her side, her legs apart, her hands hallowing the grass. 

She is resting after her tumble, the ribbon on her print dress,  

strings on a parachute. 

 

Indelible moment when children test pilot their bodies 

on flights of their own making.

 

 

Munro 

(Fiction Coming to Life or a Life Mirrored in Fiction) 

 

I 

Family secrets –  

a nest of wild bird eggs 

buried and abandoned  

under matted straw. 

 

Incriminations denials  

crack the back porch wall 

of a daughter’s summer vacation 

 

shatter the length width   

and bone of her womanhood 

 

the scent of her stepfather 

sealing the close violated air  

of her bedroom. 

 

II 

 

Silence deepens  

as the printed pages roll 

Auteur, luminary with the sharpest eye 

and a bloodhound’s nose  

for revealing human frailty. 

 

III 

 

Beloved among literary icons 

Munro’s trophy is set on a marble base 

and truth withheld in a mass media cover 

 

till a spade breaks the still grass plot 

its blade plunging through the tangle of roots     

the sanctity of motherhood 

 

to muddy, deface 

the sublimely crafted anatomy 

of story. 

 

 

Prayer for the Undeserving 

 

sing a hymn for the troubled world 

for tyrannies that rage and rampage 

under the banner of their brand of God  

 

each claiming prime share of the heavens 

a single shining truth  

 

each with its army of believers, 

followers, stragglers  

their devoted and dismayed 

 

some who adhere too closely to the word  

their very breath fraying the sacred page 

some who malign the word  

till it turns dark and disfigured 

some who scan for the gist of the word 

claiming hard-earned wisdom of its meaning 

some who dispense with the word 

like lint off their shoulders 

 

a cornucopia of voices  

 

its pitch ever rising 

without a center upon which to rest 

and build 

 

a tower of misanthropes 

the biblical rabble from whom 

we all descend 

 

 

Turning Points 

 

Ignite the ordinary  

and the flicker of a flame 

can fan a bonfire 

in the imaginative chain

 

 

Hone in on the dusk 

as the shutters half-close 

When the rim of the dawn’s 

coral light is exposed

 

Carol Lipszyc - A retired associate English professor in the SUNY system, Carol Lipszyc has published three books of poetry: a chapbook, In the Absence of Sons, (Kelsay Books, 2020); an eighty-poem anthology on the heart, The Heart is Improvisational, which she both edited and contributed to (Guernica, 2017); and her lyrical poetry collection, Singing Me Home, (Inanna, 2010). Her book of short stories on children and adolescents in the Holocaust, The Saviour Shoes and Other Stories, (2014) was published by Inanna.