Sunday, July 17, 2016

Laurie Macrae


Laurie "grew up in Albuquerque, spent six formative years in the Bay Area during the sixties, and returned to New Mexico in 1969. She has been an activist all her life and a poet, periodically, since her teens, when she was mentored by Tuli Kupferberg and other Beat poets of the San Francisco scene.

She has spent almost 30 years as a librarian, mostly in NM but for 6 1/2 years in San Diego where she retired to pursue mental health activism. She writes, swims, and does battle with the behavioral health system, which is at best inadequate and at worst abandoning the population it should serve."

California Dream

Awake, a boat,
Sinew stretched
Between the hollows
of the bolstered bed

Grains of sand sift
in the sheets
The slings of sleep so recently adrift
Warmed by friction, ignite

The same quarrel
with each wave:
To sail into the deep 
Where ancient hunger
and dread collide

Where a swell,
plunderer of senses,
Seduces each synapse 
with undertow allure

And a beach
Benignly beckons
As Pacific turbulence dresses
For evening in
a flash of green

Or raise a clouded eye to dawn 
Again the damp sea air, the clutch 
Of my own arms 
Against the bluster of the day

Warped limbs planted
on a shifting deck 
Sucked from beneath me
By the rip of time, I stagger 
But I stand

Laurie Macrae
     Nov. 10, 2014 San Diego



Mementos! (Hope you don't mind my adding this, Laurie.)

This was choice, a lot of fun to do, thanks
to the Taos Poetry Circus friends.


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