The Poem
Here is yesterday’s (Jan. 4) post. This is a pernicious flu. It hits you like a Mac truck, then watches in the rear-view mirror until you pick yourself up and start to dust off, then it guns into reverse and knocks you down again. I think I heard it laugh diabolically yesterday as it ran me down.
Here is yesterday’s found poem, a little slapdash. I took it from page 179 of Starhawk’s Truth or Dare. I really want to do more found poems, but they’ll have to be on healthier days for me! This one feels unsatisfactory, but it at least fulfills the exercise.
New Dimension
to be silenced is to be
i s o l a t e d
telling our stories
telling and hearing our stories
create intimacy
support
when we speak our experiences
we make contact
real selves:
seen, mirrored, affirmed
we can know we are valued
our lives take on a pattern
and new dimension of meaning.
Today’s Prompt
I need to rest today. Today’s poem will be a tanka, a syllable count poem. Five lines of 5/7/5/7/7 syllables. If I am inspired, I may write several. Please join me! Post here in the comments or on the FB thread.
Gratitude List
1. Looking in the window of the Bookbindery on the corner of Grant and Water and seeing a light shining on the hands of the bookbinder as he tenderly restored the cover of an old book.
2. Memories of Aunt Lizzie repairing books just as lovingly.
3. 12 hours of sleep–all four of us!
4. Elderberries
5. Memories of my father-in-law, Ellis Kreider, who died 4 years ago on Epiphany.
May we walk in beauty.
Mockingbird Chronicles 
I have lots of tankas, and already shared my found poem, but here’s a sonnet about having the flu. It’s been awful–so sorry you’ve all been going through it too.
Catching the Flu on the Third Christmas After Dad’s Death
Most birds abandon flight before the cold
and winter is the only breath we breathe.
How can deep sorrow penetrate the freeze
of sleet, of lines, of branches when the old
ones fall and cripple us? Just rest, I’m told,
but books in bed don’t comfort me. This grief
is thicker than the quilt. There’s no relief
for bitterness, no tea to ease my throat
enough. Swift fever, stifling vertigo,
I sink and sink and sink into this day,
wake only long enough to long for sleep.
If the answer is surrender then the way
to find the question is cavernous and deep
with knowing what I do not want to know.
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Oh! This one catches me like that first fierce breath of cold air. Thank you for sharing it.
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Get well.
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