2 Poems by Marilyn Kurtz

Dance!

“I grow them,” she said
Of the 7 and 8 and 9
Year olds she bends
Into little dancers
While she leaps
Across the stage
Into the night,
The sister of my
Dreams.
In the air,
Claire.


A Painting by Barnet Newman (all red)

The crippled curl,
Wheeling in our twisted wombs
To be flung naked,
Startled,
On a bed of rocks.
You, stranger, come forth
In Broad day,
Large with light,
on eagle wings.
Spanning Space
Not space at all
But all space.
The dark eyes
He has overrun with
Blood.
Flaring ladders
Across the four-fold prism
Of our weighty lids
Where once we caught
Grasshoppers.
How dare he stretch
A canvas
Across the sun!


Bionote

Marilyn Kurtz, Ph.D, is an adj. Professor in the English department at Nassau Community College in Garden City, New York. She received her doctorate from The City University of New York, with a dissertation  [Virginia Woolf: Reflections and Reverberations American University Studies Volume 119 of American university studies: English language and literature, ISSN 0741-0700 Publisher: P. Lang (1990)]. She edited and wrote for magazines and has passed on her learning to her students, who appreciate her.