Barbara Wirkus

Barbara Wirkus is a Jill of all trades and mistress of none. In her lifetime she has been a wife, mother, grandmother, teacher, Emergency Medical Technician, Medical Technologist, poet, tap dancer, gardener, photographer, writer, political activist, birder, and art gallery curator.

She loves baking cookies, movies, books, Broadway shows and The Rolling Stones. She resides in “The Little House That Could” in a small New Jersey town. Now in her 80s, she is coasting toward the finish line…



FROM MIDDLE ISLAND PRESS:

Echoes From the Bell Jar (2014)
ISBN 978-1-4951-2136-4
By Barbara Wirkus
Chapbook, revised and expanded; $9.

(Contact the publisher to obtain copies: middleislandpress@yahoo.com.)

With eighty-plus years of wisdom and experience, poet Barbara Wirkus has crafted twenty-six exquisitely poignant and wistful poems that reflect on the passage of time and some of those who have danced in her heart and still do, and her heart always responds with poetry: passionate, platonic, maternal and caring: readers are certain to FEEL the pangs and the delicate pulls in Echoes From the Bell Jar.

(A browse upon page 11…)

“Bridges, Revisited”

As we segue into later years,
women reflect,
muse upon memories,
sort them like well worn socks
into neat piles.

We sit in darkened theaters,
a reprieve from kaleidoscopic lives.
Wide-eyed and rapt,
we are held hostage by
two-dimensional dreams.

We flow like water
from high ground to low,
weeping not for what we’ve lost
but for what we never had.

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