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Private Pain in Time of Trouble by Kathleen Spivack

By T.

17 December 2005

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Private Pain in Time of Trouble
Kathleen Spivack

How can I sustain
this troubled swelling:
my heart like an eggplant,

blackened, bulbous, grows too greedy:
bruised and sorrowful,
it will not let its great loss go,

wanting to be pendulous with child.
Private pain in time of trouble
as the dark-eyed children burn.

They stretch out their small hands to me:
sparrows, and I do not hear.
It is a false spring this year.

MARGINALIA

Discovered a new poem today:

ABOUT KATHLEEN SPIVACK

Kathleen Spivack is an award-winning writer. She studied with Robert Lowell and remained friends with him for eighteen years, and is the author of many books, among them Moments of Past Happiness, A History of Yearning, and With Robert Lowell and His Circle. She has had residencies at the Radcliffe Institute, Yaddo, The MacDowell Colony, and the American Academy in Rome, and has been the recipient of grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Fulbright Commission. She

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