Below are the recordings for the Memorial Zoom event for Amy Lipton (1956-2020) and two readings by ecoartspace members presented in the second recording. You can view the list of speakers HERE

Part One: (click on image)

Part Two: (click on image)

E.J. McAdams:

Mother Tree Elegy (For Amy Lipton)

Consider a forest:
each tree transforms
sunlight into sugar.

Consider a forest:
each tree connects
through mycorrhizal threads

sapling to standing tree
sharing carbon and nutrients.
Often, at the center, there is

what scientists call a “mother tree”
a towering giant source
sinking resources sufficient

for the benefit of kin,
seedlings, injured older trees,
the shaded, and severely stressed.

No scientist has the technology (yet)
to say what it is like to be in
cooperation like this and what it feels

like to lose the mother tree in a forest,
any forest, even a forest of artists.
The scientist simply makes field notes:

When a tree dies, the trees still live.
When a tree dies, the trees still live.
When a tree dies, the trees still live.

Aviva Rahmani:

Sue Spaid asked me to write a prompt about friendship for Amy for my recent project, the Hunt for the Lost. That project pivoted on another important election, the one we are still skirmishing over. I wrote:

We lost a friend and found a sorrow.
Finding a friend is always like growing a new part of myself.
Losing a friend is an amputation.
Conversations linger in memory like phantom limbs.
Time claims us each and every one of us in death.
Loss is tempered by recalling your gifts but still,
Lost and gone.
Farewell dear friend.
Last conversations unfinished, the next show stillborn.
Or.
Peacefully sleeping, dreaming-in-waiting for someone to pick up your torch.