The Sunday Poet: Linda Larson

Linda Larson

Linda Larson was born and educated in the Midwest and spent childhood vacations and more than a decade of her adult life in Madison County, Mississippi. While in Mississippi, she worked as a feature writer for The Capitol Reporter and The Jackson Advocate. Larson relocated to the Boston/ Cambridge area where she has lived and worked for the past twenty years.

For five years she served as editor of and contributor to Spare Change News, a homeless newspaper based in Cambridge.

Over the years Larson has struggled with mental illness, homelessness and alcohol addiction.

She has been recognized by both houses of the Massachusetts Legislature for her advocacy work on behalf of people with mental illnesses.

As Larson’s life has become more manageable, she has been able to realize her long-term goal in putting together a collection of poetry, Washing the Stones, published by Ibbetson Press, August, 2007. These poems go a long way towards recapturing her promise as a graduate of the Johns Hopkins University Writing Seminars in the Seventies and as a teaching fellow in the creative writing doctoral program at the University of Southern Mississippi in Hattiesburg, Mississippi.

Movie Star

I met a movie star once at a party.

She was quiet, mousy, almost invisible,

not a magnet of attraction.

Yet on the silver screen  

her eyes were wild and her mouth

as luscious as a honeycomb.

Mother told me Bonnie and Clyde

were murdering thugs…

she ought to know,

she lived through the Depression

and read the newspapers of the day.

I miss her terribly.

There is a deep chill, a bone marrow of a chill, that sets in

when everyone you knew as a child is dead and lost forever.

Still the bright moving mosaic of the movies can

overpower one’s desolation and light fires in the cold

forgotten recesses of the human heart.