-Lucy Schwartz
Write
-Lucy Schwartz
Past Lives
The many lives I lived before
Are laid out before me
Like diverging hallways
Echoing
Each door
Wanting to be known
A will-o’-wisp leads me through the chambers
bouncing merrily along the dark, stone, castle corridor
She is the only light in the darkness, but for the dim, flickering, lanterns which adorn the walls,
The wisp looks like the floating ghost of a dog,
or perhaps a butterfly,
It’s hard to tell,
She keeps shifting and changing shape,
At times she turns to nothingness,
Her form stretches outwards into thin air and then returns to itself,
She nearly disappears every time she turns a corner,
I find myself having to walk faster and faster just to keep up,
After a long time of chasing the wisp, we reach an ancient door,
Green, wooden, and covered in moss and vines,
The wisp slyly opens the door and pulls me through,
My body is lifted up into the heavens,
I feel myself drenched in coldness,
As if I am naked in snow,
Consumed by ice,
And I find that I am frozen stiff, completely unable to move,
And yet, I am moving at incredible speed, faster than I have ever traveled before,
And then – with no warning –
I land
Thud!
Heavy as lead
I feel the hard crunch of dirt and grass beneath my feet
And that’s when I see myself
The way I was before
In this other life
How very strange to be looking at another version of myself
She is me and she is not me all at once
She was completely forgotten to me in my consciousness
And yet, it’s very clear she was known to me all along
I can hardly catch my breath
I know now that the past is not an echo
It’s alive
-Lucy Schwartz
“Love in War” Song & Short Story Audiobook
Hello friends!
I haven’t posted here in a while, but I wanted to share some very exciting news:
I just released a song called “Love in War” and it comes with a short story audiobook! I wrote the short story and narrated too! I can’t wait for you to hear it.
Listen to the song & audiobook here: https://ffm.to/0an7zn
Beautiful cover art by Photographer Brooke Shaden
BEHIND THE SCENES of how I wrote the short story:
I stumbled across a competition where the assignment was to “write a short creative fiction piece about a post-apocalyptic dystopia. The story must include a heart-shaped locket”.
The story prompt got me super excited. I immediately had a few ideas, so I jotted them down in my phone notes, but then I kept having more and more ideas. I ended up writing into the wee hours of the night (morning?) because I was bursting with story ideas. As the story came together over the coming days/ weeks, it felt like the right title for it was “Love in War” – which was the name of a song that I had already written & recorded years before, but hadn’t released yet. The more the story unfolded, the more it felt like it was a companion piece to the song. It felt like another chapter of the same story.
I didn’t end up winning the competition prize, but for me the prize was coming up with the idea & writing the story & now sharing it with you!
Much love,
Lucy
“The Monster” Short Film
Hello friends!
I have a surprise for you….
I turned one of my poems into an animated short film! I got to collaborate with an amazing animator whose work I’ve admired for years: Patrick Smith. The film is quite short (under 3 min), and it includes a surprise twist & a song!
I’m excited to share it with you!
WATCH “THE MONSTER” HERE:
HOW I MADE THE FILM:
Fun Facts:
• I didn’t originally set out to make a short film. A few years ago, I was at my typewriter, and I wrote a very quick stream-of-consciousness poem about a monster. When I shared it on instagram someone commented that it would be great as an animated short film. I thought so too. So I made it!
• The score is me on piano and my dad on bass. On one track, I’m playing the piano like…a piano. On a second track, I have the lid of the grand piano open, and I am strumming the strings of the piano. That’s what creates that eerie cascading harp-like sound and the plucking sounds.
• The song at the end of the short film was not planned. As we were recording the narration, I was goofing around by the piano, and I started making up the song, and singing in a Brittish accent, like a British 70’s rock n’ roller. It felt fun and zany and very “me” so I tagged it onto the end of the poem. Once we had the animation, the song ended up really tying the whole piece together.
• My dad is the voice of The Monster. This was not planned either. After we recorded the song, I thought, maybe Phillip should also sing something. I thought maybe, like Groot – the character from Guardians of the Galaxy who only says “I am Groot” – perhaps Phillip only says his own name. So my dad hopped in the booth and sang a few “Phillips”. I think we can all agree this is his most genius work to date.
• The way I found Patrick Smith’s amazing animation was through a video series he did called “Blank on Blank”, where he animated lost interviews of actors, musicians, artists etc. The very first video I watched of his was a “Blank on Blank” of my favorite actor. I asked Patrick if he could draw that actor into our video as one of the background characters. He did! I’m keeping it secret who it is. But you might spot this mystery actor 31 seconds in.
• Projects take time to make. I wrote the poem in October 2018. And now it’s October 2021 and it’s out in the world!
Love,
Lucy
P.S. Here is the original poem! Some of you may remember it from when I posted it on this site 🙂
What if
What if you’re not stuck? What if you’re actually on a rollercoaster, at the beginning of the ride. You’ve been ascending (though it may not have always felt like “ascending” to you, but what if it was?). And what if, right now, you’re at the very tip-top of the rollercoaster’s first peak…
…you know that moment where the ride pauses just before the drop? It’s like a real-life freeze-frame, everything just STOPS. Except for the incessant pounding in your chest, that keeps going, faster than ever. There’s so much fear inside you, turning your stomach inside out. And though, to an outsider observer, this moment is only a second, to you, it feels like an eternity. And you start to regret ever getting on the ride at all.
And then. Before you know it. You’re moving! Flying! Too fast to think about the fear. Too fast for regret. Riding high on waves of joy and elevation. Screaming a bit from the shock of it. But laughing too. Hands waving in the air. Free. The fear has moved. And so have you.
So what if, right now, in this time in your life where you feel “stuck” or “immobile”…what if you’re not stuck at all? What if you’re in the pause before everything starts to really move? Before everything gets fun?
“What if?” It’s a good question to ask….
If you know the right kind of “what if’s” to ask yourself…
-Lucy Schwartz
The Monster
Stream of Consciousness Poem
Stream of consciousness
Like a ribbon
That can’t be caught
Or held onto for very long
But which keeps unfolding
And revealing itself
If you allow it to
It’s strange what exists in there
Those thoughts that you weren’t even aware you were thinking
Those foreign feelings
Unknown to you before, in murky depths,
But which seem to have been a part of you all along
Those images, shapes, signs
Of a universal language
Which seek you out
If only you listen
I wish I could always live in that exalted space
Of universal wisdom
Of electricity
Electric thought.
Buzzing and whirring at a million miles a minute
Receiving.
Yes, that’s it.
I like when I’m a receiver of the great beyond
I like to sit in my little house
At my desk
Beside my telephone
Whose chord reaches up to the sky, past the viewing point,
A universal hotline, if you will,
That’s where I like to live
Waiting to receive.
Waiting for the call.
And then hearing it.
And picking up.
-Lucy Schwartz
Unconditional
You are lovable when you feel crazy
You are lovable when you feel sane
You are lovable in the sunshine
You are lovable in the rain
You are lovable in all circumstances
In all places,
In all moods,
In all of your emotions,
And desires,
In all your certainties and uncertainties,
In all your fears, worries and regrets,
In all the things you’ve done,
And all the things you haven’t done yet,
And in all the ways you simply, incredibly EXIST,
Without doing anything at all.
You are lovable at your worst
You are lovable at your best.
Darling,
Believe me,
You are as lovable as lovable gets.
-Lucy Schwartz
The Ever Unfolding Story
Eclipse
A poem written by the sun for the moon:
Come towards me
Hide my light for a moment
So that I can unearth truths
That have been lying in your shadow
Slow dance with me
My sweet companion
Even if it can only be for one song
Too many years have passed without your touch,
And it won’t be long before the fates separate us once again
So while we are here, together at last
Let us not weep for lost time
Or the coming goodbyes
Let us pretend
In this moment
That we have all the time in the world
As the morning birds sound “our song”
I will hold you in my arms
And dance with you cheek to cheek
And we’ll turn morning into night
With a fire so piercing it could blind
And all who witness us will be mesmerized
Standing on mountains
Sitting on cars
And porches
And lawns
Families and friends huddled together
Eyes shielded with spectacles
Hands pointing
Mouth agape
Some standing in new, unfamiliar plots of the earth
Travelers
Migrating
Just to say they caught a glimpse
Of you and I
And we’ll shake the world into remembering
That each being is a perfect union
Of both darkness and the light
Just like you and I, darling
Just like you and I
So before our song is through
Look into my eyes and
Hold me
In the way that only you know how
-Lucy Schwartz
Message From The Trees
They say every 100 years there is a great storm
They say the winds are so destructive
That they could knock down an entire forest
As a tree myself, well, I’m concerned,
Especially since the clouds have begun to hover
Dark and ominous above me
Lately, every waking hour,
I find myself thinking about this storm
Fearing it
Staring up at that great expanse of grey apocalyptic sky
In hopelessness
The thing about being a tree is
You aren’t able to run from danger
If a fire or a storm is headed your way
The only thing you can do is sit there and wait for it to hit you
And pray that somehow, miraculously, it doesn’t
It’s like in the movies when the character’s been kidnapped and tied to the tracks
And they’re waiting for the oncoming train
Waiting for impact
That’s how I feel lately
Like I’m waiting for impact
I guess I must’ve jinxed it, thinking about it so much
Because the next thing I knew
I felt the first few drops hit me
Light as could be
But boy did those clouds look heavy up above
I closed my eyes
Fearfully
Panic rising in my hollow chest
And that’s when they all fell
An entire ocean raining down
Heavy as buckets
Pounding against my head
Water turning colder, turning to hail
Bits of ice falling
Like so many sharp pieces of glass against my skin
And then the winds came
I’ve never felt such winds in my life
I dug my roots into the earth as deep as i could
And held on fiercely
I saw two trees in front of me break in half with an awful SNAP
And the third tree – my neighbor, my friend – Isabelle – fell straight over
How gracefully she fell
Like a ballerina on point
Who had lost her footing
But at a deathly cost
I was afraid
I looked to the left to my brother
And the right to my sister
They were both as terrified as I was
I reached out two branches
And intertwined my arms with theirs
We steadied ourselves
With the three of us linked together the wind seemed like less of a burden to carry
But around us our friends, neighbors and strangers were still struggling
Falling
Losing limbs
And so we reached out our arms to them
One by one
Each tree adding to our chain link
Our offering spreading down the line like a wildfire of hope, until it reached the very last struggling tree
The entire forest was now one unit
Bearing against the turning of the tides
Oaks, Elms, Pines, Junipers
It no longer mattered what we called ourselves
We were no longer divided by names
We were one
All around us the storm raged
The air a battleground
But somehow I felt steady
Held
Calm
Loved
I was a part of something greater than myself
And that made me stronger
…………
Eventually the storm passed
And we all sighed in exhaustion
Some of us weeping
Some of us laughing
Some of us in a state of shock
Slightly out of our minds, numb, and invigorated all at once
Water covered the soil below us like a newly formed lake
Looking down
I caught a glimpse of my own wavering reflection in a puddle between my roots
And I realized that I had lost all my leaves
My beautiful leaves
My oranges and yellows and greens
All gone
I was only wood
I didn’t recognize myself
Who was this barren trunk, strong like a brick wall?
This warrior woman
With the sharpness of truth blazing in her eyes?
The longer I looked
The more I realized
That something deep had changed inside of me
My leaves would grow back
As leaves always do
But I would never again be the same tree
For I had been a part of something that was greater than myself
And that had made me stronger
-Lucy Schwartz
Golden Rabbit & The Horseman 