| The Lamb
by Linda Gregg
It was a picture I had after the war.
A bombed English church. I was too young
to know the word English or war,
but I knew the picture.
The ruined city still seemed noble.
The cathedral with its roof blown off
was not less godly. The church was the same
plus rain and sky. Birds flew in and out
of the holes God’s fist made in the walls.
All our desire for love or children
is treated like rags by the enemy.
I knew so much and sang anyway.
Like a bird who will sing until
it is brought down. When they take
away the trees, the child picks up a stick
and says, this is a tree, this the house
and the family. As we might. Through a door
of what had been a house, into the field
of rubble, walks a single lamb, tilting
its head, curious, unafraid, hungry.
Linda Gregg, “The Lamb” from Chosen by the Lion. Copyright © 1994 by Linda Gregg. Used by permission of The Permissions Company, LLC, on behalf of Graywolf Press, Minneapolis, Minnesota, www.graywolfpress.org. (buy now) It's the birthday of poet and novelist Stephen Dobyns (books by this author), born in Orange, New Jersey (1941). He heard a jazz album where poems by Walt Whitman, William Carlos Williams, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, and Langston Hughes were read over jazz music and he decided to become a poet himself. His books of poems include Cemetery Nights (1987), Mystery, So Long (2005), and most recently The Day's Last Light Reddens the Leaves of the Copper Beech (2016). It's the birthday of novelist Amy Tan (books by this author), born in Oakland, California (1952). Her parents emigrated from China in the 1940s and she grew up struggling to assimilate with other kids, wishing that she would look less Chinese. She was working as a freelance writer when she took her mother on a trip to China, and she said, "It was a sense of completeness, like having a mother and a father. I had China and America, and everything was all coming together finally." She came home and found out that based on two short stories she had gotten an advance for a book. She quit her freelancing work and spent every day writing in her basement, thinking about her trip to China. In just four months, she had finished The Joy Luck Club (1989), which was a big best-seller. She went on to write The Kitchen God's Wife (1991), The Hundred Secret Senses (1995), The Bonesetter's Daughter (2001), Saving Fish from Drowning (2005), and The Valley of Amazement (2013) and Where the Past Begins: A Writer's Memoir (2017.) It's the birthday of novelist Carson McCullers (books by this author), born in Columbus, Georgia (1917). She published The Heart is a Lonely Hunter (1940) when she was just 23 years old. Her other books include The Member of the Wedding (1946). She said, "I live with the people I create and it has always made my essential loneliness less keen." It's the birthday of novelist Jonathan Lethem (books by this author), born in New York City (1964). His parents were bohemian idealists who stayed in their Brooklyn neighborhood even as most white families moved away, and there were only a handful of other white kids in Jonathan's school. He grew up, dropped out of college, worked in bookstores, and became a novelist. He decided to write a novel based on his own childhood, a story about a white kid named Dylan and a black kid named Mingus growing up together in Brooklyn in the 1970s. The two friends find a magic ring that gives them superhero powers. That novel was The Fortress of Solitude (2003). Be well, do good work, and keep in touch.® | 