Synkroniciti is elated to welcome back Californian poet Naomi Ruth Lowinsky, who won our poetry contest on the theme of “Space” last fall. This time we feature two poems dealing with family heritage and dreams. “ON HEARING YOUR MELODY IN THE PASSION OF TCHAIKOVSKY” is a tribute to her father-in-law, a musician who escaped Polish anti-semitism to raise a family on American shores. “Lifetimes later you came to my dream sweet father/ of my love as a dancing blue light Allegro Non Troppo.” Naomi uses the four movements of Tchaikovsky’s Fourth Symphony, known as the “Pathetique,” as a background to contemplate his life and reveal how family, like music, transcends time. Building to a crescendo, “Slow movements are how we serenade our dead/ with weeping strings with wailing horns/ with spirits Adagio lamentoso wandering the spheres.” It’s an elegiac poem full of internal spaces that, like rests in music, shape the way we perceive meaning. “SHAME IS THE NAME OF THE NIGHTMARE GAME” is a darker work, dealing with a nightmare of a deceased younger brother, never accepted by his father. That pain continues unmitigated even after death, seeking resolution in a sister’s mind. “I call it a sin and a shame that our long-dead dad/ continues to reign continues to break me up/ into pieces of self-hating junk and broken promise/ Even you who loved me have hardened your heart to keep my chaos out.” Naomi’s poems are desperately eloquent and ferociously delicate, full of connections and synchronicities.
Read Naomi’s transcendent poetry in Synkroniciti’s “Family” issue, available here: https://synkroniciti.com/the-magazine/purchase-individual-issues/.
Naomi Ruth Lowinsky won the Atlanta Review International Merit Award, the Blue Light Poetry Prize, and the Obama Millennial Award. Her fourth full length collection, The Faust Woman Poems, traces one woman’s Faustian adventures through Women’s Liberation and the return of the Goddess. Her fifth collection, Death and His Lorca, was published by Blue Light Press, and a new collection, Your Face in the Fire, is forthcoming from the same publisher. She is a Jungian Analyst, the poetry editor for Psychological Perspectives and blogs about poetry and life at sisterfrombelow.com.