Please join Synkroniciti in welcoming back poet Naomi Ruth Lowinsky, who won our “Space” poetry contest last fall. “An Enchantment of Unforeseen Sisters” describes a profound affinity between half sisters, children of the same father who grew up in vastly different circumstances: “you/ a cast away baby thrown far from your lineage tree/ into harsh church going Protestant hands… you/ were trapped in an itchy burlap sack of a childhood/ a shroud cast over your bright spirit Yet someone in you/ always knew you came from us refugee Jews. ” The slippery memory of their father, absent for one and a mercurial, capricious presence for the other, haunts both sisters, but what binds them together is a mystical Judaism, a faith that resides in the subconscious. Despite the physical distance between them, they write each other letters imbued with a sense of belonging that reaches back into the past “as though we’ve been sisters/ since Grandma Clara and Grandpa Leo fled the pogroms/ in the Pale?”
Naomi’s use of internal space helps us slow down and process the connections made across time and space that resulted in two sisters, separated and yet united in spirit. Her rhythm and alliterative music evoke mythology and ballad, yet remain remarkably modern and present. The effect is mesmerizing.
Read “An Enchantment of Unforeseen Sisters” in Synkroniciti’s “Belonging” issue, available here: https://synkroniciti.com/the-magazine/purchase-individual-issues/.
Naomi Ruth Lowinsky writes under the influence of her Muse, better known as The Sister from Below. This sister meanders from waking life to dream life, from the land of the living to the underworld, where ancestors hold forth about the agonies of history and the mysteries of soul. She believes that poetry is at once a musical and a mystical art, that words carry the imprint of poetic lineage, and that in poetry the Spirit of the Times and the Spirit of the Depths must commune with each other. With her help, Lowinsky has recently published her sixth book of poems, Your Face in the Fire.