Naomi Ruth Lowinsky features 2/8/16

2/8/16  Naomi Ruth Lowinsky hosted by Jim

 (author photo by Nora Lowinsky)

Naomi Ruth Lowinsky’s poetry is widely published. Her fourth full length poetry collection,The Faust Woman Poems, follows one woman’s Faustian adventures during the 1960s and ‘70s, through Women’s Liberation and the return of the Goddess. Her memoir, The Sister from Below: When the Muse Gets Her Way tells stories of her pushy muse. She is also the author of The Motherline: Every Woman’s Journey to find Her Female Roots. 

Lowinsky is a Jungian Analyst, a member of the San Francisco Jung Institute where she has taught a poetry workshop, Deep River, for many years. She is co-editor, with Patricia Damery of the essay collection Marked by Fire: Stories of the Jungian Way as well as Poetry Editor of Psychological Perspectives, a publication of the Los Angeles Jung Institute

She lectures and gives writing workshops in many settings and blogs about poetry and life at sisterfrombelow.com.

Where Coyote Brush Roams

Well they’d made up their minds to be everywhere because why not.

                                                                                          W.S. Merwin

We were high on the sky when we lived on that ridge     high

on the red tailed hawk     high

on the long green rumps of the hills going yellow

while the sun did its dance from winter to summer and back     high

on our ridge after work while the fog flowed over

darkening hills     We poured red wine on the earth     high

on escape from the city’s exhaust     high

on the song of the frogs in the pond

some man had made         

Never mind

that the pines and the cottonwood trees

knew they didn’t belong up there     Never mind

that electrical towers asserted their rights    

that coyote brush said the land was its own  

that the ridge wanted fire and we did not

We weed whacked     cleared     cut down those pines     Never mind

that we heard their cries in the night

though they never belonged up there     Never mind

that the frogs went away one day and so did we

The ancient ones who walked these lands

who made their arrows from coyote brush    

knew not to make one’s home on a ridge 

for a ridge will insist on fire

  

Home is in a valley

by a river among cottonwoods    

where once there was a river

                                            where frogs once sang in spring                                                                                                                        

                                                                                                                        Never mind