Synkroniciti is thrilled to welcome back Californian poet Naomi Ruth Lowinsky, who won our “Space” poetry contest at the end of 2023 and has graced our digital pages a number of times since. In “Where You Got Your Weird,” Naomi’s grandmother speaks across time and space, drawing a connection to the granddaughter she never saw in the flesh: “remember me your night watch witch/ clairvoyant grandmother of weird who saw you/ afloat in the dark of your sweet mother’s womb as I lay dying/ in a transit camp in the Netherlands devoured by cancer/ while Europe was devoured by evil.” She celebrates the life Naomi has been privileged to live: “what good fortune to be born in a time when a woman could live/ many lives find a love full of spirit and joy find work/ that feeds the soul practice a shapeshifting art,” and acknowledges that the evils of the past still chase and attack: “as the Russian ogre invades my homeland again even now/ as the Promised Land to which my daughters fled shapeshifts/ into its own evil we’re forced to watch the massacre of women/ and children offspring of our kin Abraham and Hagar even now.” Despite all of the turmoil, this third-eye grandmother has hope for a new world, and sees all of this back and forth as part of the process of the growth of the Tree of Life. Heritage and feminine inner knowledge teach us that life is tenacious, even as it is unpredictable.
Naomi gives voice to such powerful, timeless feeling. Internal spaces and enjambment, aided by repetition and alliteration, create a rhythm of ripples and waves that embodies and creates the surreal reality of the poem. Vibrant in the darkness, we feel her grandmother’s presence and partake in the insight that comes from that prescient weirdness that is both shocking and consoling. This is not only profound storytelling, it is soul healing.
Read “Where You Got Your Weird” in Synkroniciti’s “Identity” issue, available for purchase 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.