Poems by Leah Aronoff
Eventful Turns
by Leah Aronoff
Enigmatic, sudden, irrational shifting swirls,
flashes of synapses in the nervous system.
Is it complexity or the whistling surge of power that exhilarates?
An erratic whirl of a small flock of pigeons,
viewed from below,
is a prosaic, silly dance.
A dark mass that can’t make up its mind.
A delicate flock of small white birds,
dancing over a sand bar framed in sparkling water,
evokes the magic of a sardine school,
blindly echoing shore bird moves
in its blue, wet world.
Irrational movement has a place in my brain forever.
To find peace and beauty, I return to the shore,
the light, and the mystery of the small white birds.
Post McCarthy
I wanted friends and family
to be as angry as I.
I wanted to scream injustice to the world.
I wanted to shake some people
and kill some others.
But I was silent.
My husband worried that if word got out,
his patients would desert him.
I thought, were they lemmings?
But in light of our newly achieved
freedom from debt,
there might be support for silence.
So I bit my tongue,
gathered up my husband’s fear,
and carried it around for years and years.
"It's not easy for me to write a bio. I've lived so long, nothing and
everything fits. What I was seems to have no relationship to what I
am. Just view me as an 89 year old woman who occasionally resorts to
writing - about everything or nothing.'' Leah Aronoff