In Mud Season
 

  If you are out there where it happens, 
  everything slides, holds 
  to your soles, a kind of batter 
  that cannot nourish. you say to yourself, 
  "It’s spring!" and "This heavy sticking into 
  will go by; this muck under dead grass 
  is thick with roots and seed; 
  sun will cut through. You will get out of it, 
  and under the cold leaves matted by snow 
  housing centipedes, sow bugs and ants 
  the loam is richer for another year 
  fed by these black stirrings." 
  Black and its dizziness 
  will be just another word 
  mixed as it will be with crocus 
  and poppy color. Wait until you see 
  the patterns sun makes! Taste 
  the fresh radish and find 
  in the continuous dark and light of waiting 
  the real reason: after the flood, 
  things catch and start. The work 
  is always in motion. 
 
 

  an excerpt from In Mud Season
  © 1999,  Marcia Goldberg 

Born in Athens, Pennsylvania, landed in Canada fortyyears later in l983, Marcia Rajnus Goldberg, the second of four daughters, attended the Universities of Oregon, Texas, and Vermont before undertaking doctoral study at McGill. Her paternal grandparents immigrated to New York in 1900 from Prague, farmed in Oregon, and settled in Sacramento. She traces her love of music to this socialist grandfather’s violin and accordion playing and to the nine long years of piano lessons that her parents gave her. 

A swimmer and sometimes backpacker, Ms Goldberg married a chemist/oncologist in 1964 with whom she has one son. Following their divorce, she survived as a single mom baking bread, making candles, hosting poetry readings at The Church Street Center in Burlington, Vermont, a schooling unsurpassed by any other, and teaching in high schools and colleges. She has completed four chapbooks and several  manuscripts and currently teaches English at Vanier College in St. Laurent, Quebec. She has given scores of readings at Montreal's Véhicule, Magnus, The Word, The Double Hook, Buda Books, the Yellow Door, Café Sarajevo, and elsewhere. 
 

Ms Goldberg does fundraising readings for refugee relief, environmental and peace seeking groups, and to benefit battered women and has collaborated with Burton Rubenstein on a series of lyrical films. She shares her Saint Henri flat with seven cats and very often cycles from the Atwater Market along the Lachine canal in Montreal.