Linda Albert A career corporate trainer and personal communication and life coach with a Master Certification in Neuro-Linguistics,
Linda Albert’s essays, short stories and poems have appeared in numerous publications over the past four decades, including McCall’s Magazine, The Wall Street Journal, Sacred
Journey and SNReview. Among her awards are the Olivet and Dyer-Ives Foundation Poetry Prizes and Atlanta Review's International Merit Award. A Floridian, Linda is currently studying
Archetypal Pattern Analysis and Jungian psychology through the Assisi Institute in Vermont. She resides in Longboat Key, Florida.
Helping to Chart a Lost Continent
(First published in Other Voices International Project, Vol. 41, April 2009.)
Every woman
is part of
a lost continent
that flourished once
like Mur, Lemuria,
Atlantis,
until some ancient
cataclysm
swallowed it whole,
submerged
each woman's story
under the sea.
Fathoms deep,
we slept away
our pain for eons,
hinted at, but
best forgotten.
Now, despite that,
everywhere you look
another speck
of land appears,
thrusting itself upward
after a long and arduous
labor.
It is a delicate business,
helping to birth
a continent,
requiring every
woman-voice
to make the new/
old landmass whole
and seamless,
a foolish, fearless
heart
to chart it.