Synkroniciti is proud to welcome back poet Naomi Ruth Lowinsky of California with two poems blazing with audacious feminine energy, each one lit from within by myth, memory, and the fierce luminosity of the inner world.
“Kali Keeps Breaking My Heart” is a poetic dreamscape rooted in a youthful encounter at Mahabilipuram, a UNESCO World Heritage site near Chennai, India. Kali is a Hindu goddess revered as a personification of death, destruction and the transformative power of the eternal feminine. Half in the dreamworld and half in the reality of the pandemic, Naomi recognizes Kali’s hand in current events.
“The Great Cobra has risen over Old Mother India/ Is Vishnu having a nightmare? The breath of the people is stolen/ Oxygen hijacked Ventilators purloined Kali’s on fire/ all over the land doing Her death dance breaks everyone’s heart Everyone/ has lost someone Everyone is beyond what anyone/ can bear”
She wonders if all this suffering has a point, if it signals the painful birth of a new consciousness that might have benefit for humanity later. Will the lotus push through the mud and blossom?
Her second poem, “Visitation by the Ghost of a Young Persian Poet Bearing Sunflowers,” burns with a quieter, more intimate flame. It mourns the death of Parnia Abbasi, a 23‑year‑old poet from Tehran killed when Israeli bombs tore through her apartment building, shattering her body.
“I can’t let go/ of your face in the photo half in shadow or that blaze of sunflowers/ in your lap your eyes full of laughter as though/ you have so much to tell me as though you have chosen/ to haunt me Why?”
Naomi traces the ancient kinship between poets, between women, between Jews and Persians—a lineage stretching back to Esther, the Jewish queen of Persia. Beneath the smoke of war and the ash of politics, she insists on the essential humanity that binds us, the ember that refuses to die even in the face of the Midnight Hammer.
Naomi’s voice vibrates with mythic undertones and spiritual gravity. Her poems are built from interior spaces—silences, pauses, breaths—that act as chambers for pain, wonder, and revelation. They invite us to step inward, to feel the heat of transformation, to witness what emerges when myth and modernity collide.
Jung wrote, “Who looks outside, dreams; who looks inside, awakes.” Naomi shows us how to embrace our inner fire and come away changed.
Read Naomi’s passionate and expressive poetry in Synkroniciti’s Audacity issue, Vol. 8, No. 1, available here: https://synkroniciti.com/the-magazine/purchase-individual-issues/.
Nami Ruth Lowinsky’s muse has a habit of wandering between the day world and the dream world, between the world of the living and the world of the dead. Her muse insists that the realm of spirit and the realm of politics speak to one another, that poetry is a musical as well as a mystical form, tells human stories as well as mythological stories–opening the doors to visionary realms. Lowinsky has learned the hard way, that it is essential to listen to her muse.
Lowinsky’s sixth book of poems, Your Face in the Fire, was published recently. She is a member of the C.G. Jung Institute of San Francisco, Poetry Editor for Psychological Perspectives, and blogs about poetry and life at sisterfrombelow.com.