Linda was a hospice nurse and poet and back in '83, when I lived in Oklahoma, she entrusted me with a sheaf of her poems. I have lost track of her. Perhaps if she is still of this world, she will find her way to this page. Or perhaps a friend who remembers her as I do: alive like spring, empathic, fiercely independent. I know that her last name changed both before and after '83. I heard one rumor of her violent death. May that not be true! Whatever the circumstances are she should be remembered for her special gift of midwifery as described here in one of her poems. The last face that many dying souls saw, the last caring touch they felt, the last radiance, was hers. I will post other poems of hers from time to time.
In the winter hours
I paced the lonely hall
Waiting for a birth (of sorts)
Within a dying fall.
Much of birthing's easy,
But some births,
they are hard,
Hard as the hickory nut
Whose sprout waits for the sun,
Hard as the knife within my breast
When grieving's on.
But midwives must keep birthing
new or dying souls,
A kind of birth it was that night,
And, Lord, the wind was cold.
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