A Convergence of Tribes

I feel them around me, like a collage of beautiful faces from the Bowery Poetry Club in New York, surrounding me like a primrose of light or a string of beads woven in an energetic band within my heart. Many faces, many deeply interlinking stories and tribes. I sit up late cross-legged on the bed, one long day later, after everyone has gone to sleep in Maria Papacostaki's beautiful Philadelphia home. I close my eyes, and they are there–Nancy Rigg, who flew in from California, glowing and beautiful–surrounded by her family as she read "Life After Death," then introducing her sister and the two little boys in her story. The boys are grown men now, and were seated in the audience with their own young children in strollers. In one of many uncanny synchronicities surrounding the day, the reading was Nancy's birthday, April 4. Surrounded as she was by so much love, it became a sweet, luscious birthday gift.

And the wonderful Elenna Rubin Goodman, also just arrived a few days before from California, introducing me to her dear New York friends and family, who were clearly thrilled to have her back in her hometown. Elenna read her essay "Taking The Tail" beautifully, as if channeling her human and animal ancestors like the Medicine Woman she is. It was lovely to see Elenna embracing her long-time friend, the poet Maria Papacostaki, just arrived from Philadelphia; and Maria reading her evocative, lyrical poetry so that we were floating in Greece along with her.

I can picture the faces as if fingering prayer beads. The very beautiful Elizabeth Sturz walking in with her husband Herb and many family members, embraced with love by her niece Ratna. Elizabeth has written books and published poetry for many decades, and was helped onto the stage by her niece Paula de la Cruz, who read Elizabeth's poem "Listen You Fire Flingers" as if channeling not only Elizabeth but the great Mother Earth herself. It was stunning, fierce, clear-eyed, thrilling–as if Paula understood the poem from some great depth of her being.

My beloved Jean, always a fresh delight to everyone, spoke of her love of the redwoods and the mountains of California, and read "Just Brushing the Lips Of" as a praise poem to Spring. There was wonderful Ratna, surrounded by her family, reading "Spirit Sisters", and knowing that she was offering a creation myth, the kind of story that has sustained humanity throughout the ages.

And there was Riva. Riva Danzig, the wonderful, the soulful–reading her poem "Sacred Things" about her marriage with Karen, her partner of twenty years. It is a poem about the daily rhythms of love, about raising children and making a life, finding the music that lives in the heartbeat of a couple. Riva is a native New Yorker, born and bred, and not ever having met her, knowing her only through her beautiful poem, I had imagined that she and her beloved would be with us that day. But weeks before the event, as Riva and I were emailing about another poem she might read, I learned that Karen died of cancer four years ago. And what I could never have known was this amazing synchronicity: April 4, the day of our reading, was itself the very day marking the 4th anniversary of Karen's death. Riva read "Sacred Things" with great beauty, and her second poem, "In Memorium", was about the process of caring for Karen in her illness and then ultimately relinquishing her, and again I was weeping, the unreasonableness of this life, and how we are handed these moments, a beautiful woman reading poetry of love and grief, and there was nothing so true, anywhere, but that moment, then.

April 4. Nancy Rigg's birthday. The four year anniversary of Riva's partner's death. And, as Nancy began to read, there was just another lovely wave in the circle of synchronicities: Nancy's essay, in the form of a journal entry about a pivotal moment of healing after the death of her fiance, opens with the line, "Almost four years since Earl's death..."

Okay. I know we have a magical book. I know the spirits are with us. But like all humans I forget or I don't believe or I'm confused or tired or puny. But these things happen, and they are real. On one unforgettable afternoon, many tribes surged together to share one singular moment; all revolving around the love of each other, a dedication to carrying the stories, a valuing of poetry and of language that shines into truth.

In my prayer beads of beautiful faces is Audrey, a lovely woman who is blind with a seeing-eye dog, who'd gotten an email from the local Threshold Choir just the day before. She came out to hear us read, alone with her dog, hugging me warmly, saying we should make a CD of the spoken poetry, that there is nothing like hearing a poem read by the author. She plans to take Sisters Singing home with her and scan it so that she can hear the rest, but it's won't quite be the same as hearing the author. And thank you, thank you, she told Jean and I, before having Jean make out her check, then asking which direction she should turn to begin to make her way out of the club.

It was like that: her getting the email just in time, the old friends of Ratna's from Canada who, quite amazingly, just happened to be visiting New York this past weekend. They were thrilled with it all, with Ratna's reading, with everyone's. One of them said if we'd worked for years trying to plan such a convergence we couldn't have pulled this off. Families, children, young people, college students, people of every age and type, sitting with us as we read of grief, exaltation, love, eros, spirit, ancestors, and the everyday world of prayers and love.

At the end a women named Ina excitedly told me she was my friend Ina Nadborny's aunt, there with Ina's cousin, and they loved the reading, and bought four books to give as gifts. I threw my arms around them, unreasonably happy, and we got our picture taken. I felt we could talk all afternoon, that I already knew them, as I already knew so many there, although we'd never spoken before and may never have our journeys join again. No matter; there is a linking here that is ageless and unspoken.

Ratna said to me on Friday morning, New York won' be like Asheville. New Yorker's aren't so easy... you know, less is more. It will be a less effusive crowd. I understood her point, and it's true, Asheville is a dear place where people are connected in circles and communities. But as I talked to many of the sixty or so people there in New York on Saturday, I detected no less enthusiasm. People are pretty much people wherever you go. One woman said she could have listened to us read for another hour. For a moment that afternoon, there was simply one full, united tribe; many thrilled people surrounded by a wide and touchable bandwidth of love.

New York was a great, crazy collage; we were there for less than 24 hours, and ended the day in Philadelphia with Maria and her partner Terry. But there is one last face that stays with me now: Ratna's Uncle Bob, where we stayed for our one night there. Bob, 88 years old, is paralyzed from a stroke two years ago. Bob, with incredibly kind eyes, saying he's always loved women, thrilled to see Ratna, and telling us stories of her and their family. Bob, who welcomed Jean and I, holding out his one movable hand, grinning in the way that a true heart grins. Jean read him a poem, we showed him Sisters Singing, with Elizabeth's work and with Ratna's. I'm sorry I can't welcome you in the way I'd want to, he said. Oh Bob. You made New York warm and gentle. There could have been no sweeter welcome.

Skyscrapers, delayed planes, taxis with GPS maps on a screen in the back, porters and elevators up to the 12th floor. And the wonderful Bowery Poetry Club, with a little cafe in front, and a beat-up crazy stage and bar in the back. We loved it; we'll never forget it; the young New Yorkers pouring the drinks and helping us get set up. The grandmother drum, all set on the stage by the lights and the mikes, and then they starting coming: the grand, beautiful mixing of the tribes. It was another day in our Sisters Singing world. And a day unlike any other.

One woman I'd never met said to me, You are living a good life now, aren't you? Yes. Yes, I am living a good life now, it is a sweet, good life. I see that the human tribe can be filled with light. This fills me. I'm filled with faces. When I close my eyes, people beam back at me from across the ages, through memory and literature, on the line of a poem, in a song, the sisters singing our way, dancing lightly upon the earth, saying, as Riva said after the reading, Yes, let's dance. Let's dance!