Synkroniciti is thrilled to welcome back poet D. Dina Friedman of Massachusetts, who previously featured in our “Space” and “Belonging” issues, with three deeply introspective poems concerning expectations and aging.
The first, “It Was So Foggy at the Peak,” one of our Expectations poetry contest finalists, explores a memory of hiking up a mountain with a close friend from childhood.
“We were seizing/ the day, pressing on because we were almost there./ We are always almost there. And we are never there./ The apex, an aspiration. And better to be climbing// than on the downhill.”
The friend was later affected by a degenerative disease and mobility slowly diminished. This journey up the mountain and back becomes a melancholy metaphor for life, revealing that it is easier to live in expectation than in the aftermath of happiness or success. Time slips away quickly and relentlessly. We cannot retain what we have accomplished.
In Siren’s Wish List, Dina imagines an aging siren, exposed and alone upon her unforgiving rock, desiring a change of fortune.
“I want the fold of a two-year-old’s fingers/ moist between my talons. And to sing// the way I used to sing, before my aged voice brittled/ and people stopped believing in the splendor/ of wings—not like a diva, just enough for diva dreams;”
The web of emotion the narrator experiences is complex and conflicting–she wants to return to her full-throated youth, she wants to be loved, she wants a chance to reincarnate and change her nature. The imagery that Dina explores humanizes her, transforming the siren from a mythic predator into a figure of vulnerability and longing—one of us, rather than other.
Finally, “Birthday Poem” is about desiring a better world, about how birthdays often remind us that human beings aren’t growing kinder year by year.
“I hunger for a rebirth,/ the world morphed to a mindset where it’s unthinkable/ for people to hurt each other.”
Though sweetness remains: strawberries, small miracles—the larger vision is of a world that never quite fulfills its promise. And yet, despite disappointment, hope persists.
Read Dina’s reflective poetry in Synkroniciti’s Expectations issue, Vol. 8, No. 2, available here: https://synkroniciti.com/the-magazine/purchase-individual-issues/.
D. Dina Friedman has published in many literary journals, including Salamander, Rattle, The Sun, Mass Poetry, Chautauqua Journal, Crab Orchard Review, Cider Press Review, Hawaii Pacific Review, Cold Mountain Review, Lilith, Negative Capability and Rhino, and received four Pushcart Prize nominations. She is the author of two books of poetry, Here in Sanctuary, Whirling (Querencia Press) and Wolf in the Suitcase (Finishing Line Press). Dina’s fiction includes the short-story collection Immigrants (Creators Press) and two YA novels, Escaping Into the Night (Simon and Schuster) and Playing Dad’s Song (Farrar Straus Giroux). To learn more about Dina, visit her website at http://www.ddinafriedman.com and subscribe to her blog on living a creative life in a creatively challenged universe at ddinafriedman.substack.com.