Examples of Linda’s poetry and a listing of publications can be found at lindaspoetryblog.blogspot.com.  When not writing, Linda is an avid reader, classical guitar player, and a practitioner of both Yoga and Tai Chi.  In, addition, she helps her husband, a Luthier, build acoustic guitars.  She lives in Wichita, Kansas, U.S.A.  She enjoys her 200-gallon saltwater reef tank wherein resides her 21 year old yellow tang.  Linda’s published paperback poetry collections include Big Questions, Little Sleep,Big Questions, Little Sleep: SecondEdition, Lost and Found, Red Is The Sunrise, and Bus Lights, Travel Sights: Nashville and Back. She has three e-books published by Soma Publishing;  The Sea’s Secret Song, Pairings, which is a hybrid ebook of short fiction and poetry, and That Fifth Element.  Her fourth e-book entitled Per Quindecim will be published by Soma Publishing in March, 2021. Linda has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and has four Best Of The Net nominations.  

No Spotlight Within The Storm’s Grace

As midnight darkens your crystalline house,
you watch the rain outside fill a pail.
Deep, thick downpours, saturating, all the more, the sorrows of man.

The sky’s in agony, but storms satisfy you. 
Drinking the blood of a reasoned day,
inside your strange quarters, 
releases none of your treasured turmoil into the air.
There’s something needful about imagining
the security of not being in the spotlight.

Cherish the remaining black hours
before slivers of blue sky, not wished for beyond the dawn, are shown.
Once bouncing raindrops now lying flat.
Such is not the pretty picture many say it should be,
and you cannot conceive 
that there is anything more majestic than total darkness.

Your tears shed as fear is revealed, contentment concealed,
because they told you that you must not forget to play like a child;
skip, sing, smile, run, 
all this you do 
beneath the lunacy of a now bright sky.

Monument To Love

Within each heart is planted hopes and dreams.
I’m always trying to figure out how much love my heart can contain.
The width and length give no clue, neither does its thickness,
nor does the depth to the center, but its purpose is clear.
There is muscle memory which tells so much.
I know it holds love.  I know it carries veneration.
In sorrow, it does not break as much as gain weight.

I suppose when everyone 
I have ever loved has passed on,
it will become a stele.

Temperatures Within Memories

I did not wish to revisit the fire and blind of the sun,
nor to fly back to that forgotten burn
that introduced us to all our summers.

But, there you were,
Standing,
on the sidewalk in front of my house.
And now the landscape of my front yard has changed.

I slip back the curtain.
I think to myself,
wasn’t it you who loved Lightfoot and his carefree highway,
and wasn’t that why you left?

I watched you try to stuff your breath in my mailbox.
You only left dust in the shade within where you stood.

That night in a dream,
I finally understood the truth of you.
That dream explained your magnetic strangeness.
 All those images in the dream,
those half-lit or full faces
floating on new, cool waves of the sea,
I thought those were all you,
or did I just imagine the relief from the heat.