Laurie Macrae

Laurie "grew up in Albuquerque, spent six formative years in the Bay Area during the sixties, and returned to New Mexico in 1969. She has been an activist all her life and a poet, periodically, since her teens, when she was mentored by Tuli Kupferberg and other Beat poets of the San Francisco scene.

She has spent almost 30 years as a librarian, mostly in NM but for 6 1/2 years in San Diego where she retired to pursue mental health activism. She writes, swims, and does battle with the behavioral health system, which is at best inadequate and at worst abandoning the population it should serve."

California Dream

Awake, a boat,

Sinew stretched

Between the hollows

of the bolstered bed

Grains of sand sift

in the sheets

The slings of sleep so recently adrift

Warmed by friction, ignite

The same quarrel

with each wave:

To sail into the deep 

Where ancient hunger

and dread collide

Where a swell,

plunderer of senses,

Seduces each synapse 

with undertow allure

And a beach

Benignly beckons

As Pacific turbulence dresses

For evening in

a flash of green

Or raise a clouded eye to dawn 

Again the damp sea air, the clutch 

Of my own arms 

Against the bluster of the day

Warped limbs planted

on a shifting deck 

Sucked from beneath me

By the rip of time, I stagger 

But I stand

Laurie Macrae

     Nov. 10, 2014 San Diego

Poem of Laurie's from Roosevelt Park Albuquerque days: http://www.dukecityfix.com/profiles/blogs/the-sunday-poem-laurie-macrae-roosevelt-park-theory-and-practice

And another, Baseball caps! http://www.dukecityfix.com/profiles/blogs/the-sunday-poem-laurie-macrae-the-reason-we-wear-our-baseball

Mementos! (Hope you don't mind my adding this, Laurie.)

This was choice, a lot of fun to do, thanks
to the Taos Poetry Circus friends.