SAXTONS RIVER — The universe is rich with people who pass through it, if not in total or undeserved anonymity then with less attention than should have been theirs. Some of these people grace our lives like a spring breeze in the aftermath of a winter day and make us glad.
One of those people, a poet called Marguerite Striar, wafted into my life a long time ago and made me grateful. She, and her art, should have received far more attention than they did, for she was a fine writer and an excellent soul. This essay, which I am writing on her 92nd birthday, is in memoriam.
Marguerite died several months ago, at the age of 91, from surgical complications. Her mind was still keen, her creative powers strong. Shortly before her death, she pitched an idea to Oprah Winfrey about a new style of poetry she was developing.
Not long before she died, she penned an untitled poem that began, “You don't know what it's like to be old until you are old...At 91, there's still a young person inside….” The poem concludes, “I can still write a scintillating line or two even if it climbs the page in a crooked line [and] low vision is better than no vision. I'm grateful for the strong dark silhouettes of trees.”
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This is the Marguerite I knew when I contributed a poem to her epic collection of Holocaust poetry, Beyond Lament, published in 1998 by Northwestern University Press after many other foolish publishers had turned it down.
We were writing pals in Washington, D.C. When either of us got discouraged, we'd talk and buck each other up, a mutual admiration society of two. She was a wonderful mentor and motherly figure and even though I hadn't seen her in many years, I will miss her. Her daughter, Valerie, who called to tell me about her mother's death, called her “a gentle, mystical, graceful woman,” and I couldn't agree more.
Born Marguerite Marcia Minsky in Boston in 1916, Marguerite was an artist, editor and educator as well as a writer. She worked as a cartographer for the U.S. Geological Survey during the war and later contributed to Washingtonian magazine and other publications. Once a radio script writer for Voice of America, a story she wrote in the early '90s was nominated for the O. Henry Best Short Story award.
Marguerite was passionate about humanity and social justice. Active in the World Federalist Movement and claiming Bahai, Sufi, and Jewish identities, much of her writing dealt with deeply important universal issues.
In the 1940s she wrote about war and peace and what we now call the global village. She voted absentee before she died and was thrilled, I'm told, at the prospect of a mixed-race president.
Another of Marguerite's poems, called “Thinking of God,” begins,
The cicadas are humming their once-in-17 years mating song.
The plumbers in the basement are replacing the old rusty pipes
With new copper ones.
Yesterday's dentist's drill still echoes in my brain
And Aria's sweet baby voice is on the speaker phone…
I am thinking about God.
The poem ends like this:
Be positive.
Begin each day with thankfulness and hope,
Give thanks for all those others, past and present,
Who have inspired me to think and believe in spirit.
This is quintessential Marguerite, writing about plumbers and dentists and granddaughters and God, all with gratitude, a tinge of sadness, and her inimitable warmth.
Something else Marguerite wrote in the Acknowledgments to her poetry anthology was this: “Even if you are determined to run the race, how it helps to have a cheering section!”
So this essay is my hip hip hooray! to a woman and a writer I have admired and been proud to call friend. I give thanks for her “past and present.” She did indeed inspire me “to think and believe in spirit.”
How much the world would benefit from a few more Marguerites.