Linda Benninghoff

In 9th grade my English teacher suggested I become a writer. She said I could successfully create a mood. She gave me Theodore Roethke to read. (Now he is my favorite poet). I began writing poetry when I was 16 but at that time I was just playing with the sounds of words. It took another teacher to help me learn to express my feelings through poetry, and try to transform the often sad material of life into something meaningful.

I have written some poems about my childhood. I have some father poems. They are included in my chapbook "The Street Where I Was A Child." My best friend died about two years ago and I wrote many elegies for her---enough to fill a book. As the grief recedes, the poems deal less with death and more with pleasant aspects of our life together.

I like to write about animals and am active in the animal rights movement. I am a member of The Fund For Animals, write letters for The Humane Society and other groups.

I continue reading. I recently translated The Seafarer (an Old English poem) from the Old English.

Visit I took the train back to Baltimore in the middle of the night. The cobblestones my feet beat against didn't recognize me. I was older and slower. I walked over memories bare and blank, the light almost gone out of them, like the light that lingers in the eyes of dead fish on counters in the stores. I could not stay long. The building whose roof we climbed on was torn down, and the yellow stoplight across the street squeaked in the wind with a voice of its own. I could not breathe the changed air. I called out to you. You were years away in a boat rowing through twists and turns, feeling out the darkness at the corners of the world.       Top of the Page. Snow Falling Once I walked out thinking it would be hard to find a day like this: outside of the house snow falling, the lines in the rhododendron leaves gone white. Five birds, chilled, silent, stretch their necks toward food under the covered lawn. And I am like them seeking in this place something hard to come by— a world swollen with snow, the spaces between things lessened, and change coming, overnight, in quiet, change once so hard to believe in.       Top of the Page. The Deer Yesterday the deer came to the window, her head lifted, fearless and beautiful even to the corners of her eyes. All afternoon she balanced easily, waited through the twilight still, proud. I thought of children who walk for years through streets they do not know, their heads upright, seeking. And although I walk heavily to the window, and see little in the world outside, I know this will not always be so, as it is not so for this deer, as she moves, fragile, unafraid of what she loves, at one with the light, grass and sky.       Top of the Page. Five Leaves Soon I will need all the silence of this morning to shield me: snow falling through emptiness, the last five leaves on a tree, abrupt in the sky, like five flat hands, gathering whiteness. I am growing very patient inside, and I am going far over some shaking emptiness, till I can come back, needing this silent morning.       Top of the Page.

Spiders When I was a child, my father would catch spiders and wrap them up in his pocket handkerchief, then throw them out into the yard where dead leaves stood in piles and were not collected till the end of November. When I was 20, I wanted to join the University's intramural softball team. He played with me in the backyard, smiling, as if some happiness always hung around him. In the evenings, he told me stories of the Indiana town where he grew up, of bear-fur left on trees, he had found in the mornings, walking out in the woods, alone. Yesterday night, he sat in his favorite chair, his eyes quiet, his motions slowed down. He was reading a newspaper and staring into some darkness in the corner of the small room. The spiders he let go when I was a child, disappeared into dark, and the tall, heavy trees of the Indiana town, became an indistinguishable color, at nightfall. Mothers and fathers long dead now who made preserves in summer lifted up their faces into the sky at evening. and talked of what they would do the following day. As I sat near him he slept, woke, returned to reading. I left after eating, past the unkempt lawn, the leaves still not gathered in January.       Top of the Page. Whose Cries Are Not Music I wait all summer by the dark, torn pond for the geese whose cries are not music but catch in my ears: the cry of wild things who put into that sound wing-beat, empty marshes, clouds and their quests for home. They have traveled miles, are far from earth when I hear them, but I think of a child who has no words and will cry without stopping. as if everything must begin in pain. I can spend my whole life healing it, but find in the end that love itself contains pain though I do not give up feeling it, as today I do not give up hearing these geese whose cries are constant, and I pause as their shrillness softens and the light fades and the night comes with silence.       Top of the Page.

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