January 3, 2017

Lynne Knight

YEAR’S END. YEAR’S BEGINNING.

The wrens in the coast live oaks
wait for the crows to stop squawking,
then swoop for insects, singing.
No winter, here. No rain, either.

Last night the fireworks across the bay
were clear as stars in their first fire.
Then smoke obscured them, made them
streak like small comets. How one thing

becomes another, even the body
as time works through it. My heart
has seemed so heavy, but it lifts
as the wrens hold still like notes on a staff.

Light pierces a cloud & scatters in shards.
The ceasefire might hold. Bulldozers
might stop opening the earth for more
blood to be shed in the ruins. I don’t know

what more to tell you. Try to keep your heart
open as the door a stranded motorist
walks through, ghostlike with snow
from the blizzard, grateful for being
          in time.

Poets Respond
January 3, 2017

[download audio]

__________

Lynne Knight: “I don’t make resolutions, but as 2016 drew to a close, I kept telling myself that I needed to start looking for reasons to hope since despair, which is pretty much my default position, seems too dangerous now. So this is a poem in that direction.” (link)

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December 16, 2016

Lynne Knight

WATER CHILD

We didn’t talk much about the brother who died
while being born because a drug
the doctor gave my mother was too strong,
meant to kill pain she could still feel
decades later, though when asked
she said only The doctor felt terrible,
her way of setting limits to the unbearable.

If we did talk, we called him the first one
or the one born dead. Born dead! I’d stare
at my mother’s stomach, dreading something
bloodied & skinless would slide silently
to the floor. No one would say anything
as we wrapped it in old newspapers to hide
deep where the garbage man wouldn’t see.

In Japan, they call those who weren’t
born with their breath water children
because they live & die in the salty sac water.
My mother’s body held tears never shed.
They made a watery grave for the dead one.
We never talked about the times she felt him
try to rise out of it, desperate for breath.

from Rattle #53, Fall 2016

[download audio]

__________

Lynne Knight: “I have a well-developed obsessive streak, one that clearly influences my writing habits. I go to my writing room at the same time every day with a cup of hot tea (Earl Grey). I start my computer; I start a poem (checking email first = killing the poem). Some days (rare days), instead of sinking into a clumsy exercise, the poem takes off. I think of those as the good days, but the truth is, any day I can write is a good day. Even when nothing much comes of it, I love doing it.” (link)

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February 10, 2016

Lynne Knight

THE TWENTY-YEAR WORKSHOP

I loved hearing the guy on the local station
in the small town where I lived for twenty years:
Here in the foothills of the Adirondacks.
I was trying to become a poet, and I thought
everything I heard could become a poem
if I could figure out how to make use of it,
the way frontierswomen made use of berries
for dyes, or stones for doorstops, if doors
were there at all. And by then I’d be far off
in Kansas, the sun blinding me, the old mule
dying of thirst in the drought, my own lips
so swollen and cracked I could barely speak,
my children woeful at the table. Then Oklahoma,
the Dust Bowl, trying to seal all the openings
from the heavy black night rolling toward me
in the middle of the afternoon. Meanwhile,
the foothills of the Adirondacks, where often
the snow buried cars, farm equipment,
old roads in the woods. I thought my life
was inadequate to poetry, and my mind along
with it, so often I tried to be Eliot, Pound,
all those revered at the time as masters.
And I would despair, because nothing I wrote
sounded as beautiful or profound as the foothills
of the Adirondacks, the word foothills alone
like its own little poem, hidden in the shadow
of the mountains, which, as I drove over them
to visit my sister in Vermont, seemed to taunt me
with their permanence, until slowly the need
to redeem as my own the words of others
became less desperate, and even shadows spoke.

from Rattle #50, Winter 2015

[download audio]

__________

Lynne Knight: “The older I get, the luckier I feel that writing is such an essential part of my life. It’s like having a lover who can madden and exasperate you but then, out of seeming nowhere, take you places you never dreamed you’d go … a lover who gives maybe too many lessons on how to survive rejection but—huge plus—never makes you fear abandonment.” (website)

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December 6, 2015

Lynne Knight

AMERICA LISTEN ALLEN GINSBERG IS CALLING YOU AGAIN

Including the worst mass shooting of the year, which unfolded horrifically on Wednesday in San Bernadino, Calif., a total of 462 people have died and 1,314 have been wounded in such attacks this year, many of which occurred on streets or in public settings, the databases indicate.
—New York Times, December 3, 2015

America you are sick. The worm of corruption
eats at your heart & slaughters your children
in schoolrooms, in churches, in community centers.
America you have lost your way. America there are more
mass killings than there have been days in this year.
America your sons & daughters live in fear ginned up
by corrupt greedy media & shameless politicians.
Fear of the other, the other. America we are all other,
& we are sick, & the no longer invisible worm
eats at our hearts. Our malls have become killing fields
America. Our colleges our cities and their buildings.
America where are you? America listen the fall
is here & we are plummeting headlong down.
America why can’t you hear. Are you deafened
by the roar of assault rifles America? America
no one wants to take your small guns only the big guns
the magazines that keep firing firing firing. America
give them up. Throw them in a pile & burn them America
so you can pull your soul back from ruin & wreckage.
America people with assault guns kill people. They kill
more & more people America. Yes they might try to kill
with small guns with knives with ropes but there would be
no mass killings with ropes or knives or small guns because
the killers would have to keep reloading & reloading
giving their hostages time to escape. America
you are sick & the worm at your heart is spinning
across continents & over oceans. America do something
before it’s too late. Do something while we can still say
your name America. We know who you were supposed
to be. So stand up America. Throw down your assault guns
your automatics & walk into the beauty of the sunset the heart
of the rose. America listen to me let the worms wither & die.
America stop cowering in the shadow of the NRA & listen.
This is your heart America. Beating & beating. Your heart
that can bear only so much reality especially if it comes
in the form of rapid bullets only you can stop. America
put your queer transgender gay straight no-gender shoulder
to the wheel & listen America listen before it’s too late.

Poets Respond
December 6, 2015

[download audio]

__________

Lynne Knight: “On the one hand, imitating Ginsberg even a little seems an act of appalling hubris. On the other, while I watched the terrible news from San Bernadino, I really could hear his iconic ‘America’ calling out to us to stop the madness that allows these mass killings to continue.” (website)

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December 14, 2014

Lynne Knight

DARK PRISON LEDGER

Nothing he told us was true.
But we wanted to hear it,
how we wanted to hear it.
We did everything we could

to get him to say it. He spoke
many languages, he cried out
like someone swept by the force
of veracity. So we put away all

our instruments. The rack, the bit,
the noose that had been
of use. And at last, broken
free of pain, his cries went forth

far beyond the unnamed city
while we stood at our windows
hearing the wind open pages
in the book of our shame.

Poets Respond
December 14, 2014

[download audio]

__________

Lynne Knight: “What surprised me most about the report on CIA torture was how extensively and apparently meticulously the torture had been recorded. And yet we know only the broad outline. Dark prisons, dark ledgers.” (website)

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November 16, 2014

Lynne Knight

ON HEARING OF ROBIN WILLIAMS’ DIAGNOSIS

My mother had Lewy body dementia, too, a late
diagnosis. Eight years of losing all trace
of herself, like someone following her shadow
into a forest that got deeper and deeper
until it became what Thoreau called
standing night. Her name was Knight,

so sometimes I would think of her as
Standing Night, her shadow lost altogether
by then. Her words, her understanding.
So when I heard that Robin Williams
had the same ruinous disease, I thought
what a generous thing he had done,

what a courageous thing, without the help
of drugs or alcohol or anyone, not wanting
to implicate anyone in his death in a state
where assisted suicide is forbidden.
I thought if there were an afterworld
where the soul is restored to its original

form, my mother would find her way
to Robin Williams and tell him he’d done
the right thing, the thing she would have done
if she’d known all she had coming.
But I don’t believe the soul continues.
The spirit lives on in the hearts of others,

so Robin Williams will live as close
as it gets to forever. As for my mother,
she’d be content to know how much
my sister and I miss her, how we still
talk to her, how we rely on her wisdom
to stand us by on darkest nights.

Poets Respond
November 16, 2014

[download audio]

__________

Lynne Knight: “When my mother was diagnosed with Lewy body dementia in January of 1999, there were only four or five websites that had any information about it. But now it’s recognized as the second-most common form of dementia, after Alzheimer’s. Because I believe that had my mother known what she had coming (she was diagnosed four years into the illness), she would have committed suicide, I was deeply moved by this news about Robin Williams. I’m glad he was able to stop the disease before it turned him into someone not himself.” (website)

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August 31, 2014

Lynne Knight

THE LETTER FROM JAMES FOLEY

after Melissa Bloch’s NPR interview with Diane Foley, August 28, 2014

Sometimes in the morning, sometimes at night
he spoke the letter slowly,
the same words in the same order,
a living testament

He spoke the letter slowly
while his friend Daniel memorized
a living testament
from the desert of captivity

While his friend Daniel memorized
every word, every detail
from the desert of captivity
the mother and father waited and waited to hear—

every word, every detail
would come as a gift
the mother and father waited and waited to hear—
something, anything

would come as a gift
from the son they hadn’t wanted to go back to Syria—
something, anything—
last words

from the son they hadn’t wanted to go back to Syria,
the only words he could offer,
last words,
over and over … In the dark cell, the same words,

the only words he could offer,
this litany of all he loved,
over and over, in the dark cell, the same words
so they might bring him back as if from the dead—

this litany of all he loved,
the same words in the same order
so they might bring him back as if from the dead
sometimes in the morning, sometimes at night

Poets Respond
August 31, 2014

[download audio]

__________

Lynne Knight: “Hearing Diane Foley speak of the letter from her son that his friend Daniel memorized to bring out of captivity and ‘deliver’ to her, I thought she herself must have the letter by heart now. In responding to her gratitude for this unexpected gift (her word), a pantoum seemed the right form to use, given its repetitions and its ending that returns to the beginning.” (website)

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