Write a Bob and Wheel. If you’ve studied the classic British epic poem “Sir Gawaine and the Green Night,” you’ve experienced the Bob and Wheel form. The stanzas of this poem consist of an initial two-syllable line (the bob), and four lines of three stresses each (the wheel). The bob rhymes with lines 2 and 4 of the wheel.
Here’s my quick attempt. With a little more time to ruminate, I think I could love playing with this form.:
You dream
of friends around a hearthfire,
their tender eyes a-gleam:
their stories will inspire.
You will learn the theme.
Gratitude List:
I’m still in the throes of the very unsettling dream that woke me up at 4 this morning. It’s hard to think of gratitudes with the stark images my mind pieced together still floating through my brain. I suppose that’s what meditation and contemplation are about, finding my to hold the disturbing pieces gently while searching for anchors.
1. All the violets!
2. The guarddogwoods are about to burst into bloom.
3. Creative projects
4. Wakefulness
5. The wisdom of high school students.
May we walk in Beauty!
The Soul, it sees by synesthesia
Tasting light caressed by song
A touch is like a descant fire
resonant and strong.
—Craig Sottolano
“I’m not as cooperative as you might want a woman to be.” —Carrie Fisher
“The unconscious wants truth. It ceases to speak to those who want something else more than truth.” —Adrienne Rich
And did you get what
you wanted from this life, even so?
I did.
And what did you want?
To call myself beloved, to feel myself
beloved on the earth.
-—Raymond Carver’s Late Fragment, inscribed on his tombstone
Put down the weight of your aloneness and ease into
the conversation.
The kettle is singing
even as it pours you a drink, the cooking pots
have left their arrogant aloofness and
seen the good in you at last.
All the birds
and creatures of the world are unutterably
themselves. Everything is waiting for you.
—David Whyte
“Not all of us can do great things. But we can do small things with great love.”
―Mother Teresa
“Walking. I am listening to a deeper way. Suddenly all my ancestors are behind me. Be still, they say. Watch and listen. You are the result of the love of thousands.”
―Linda Hogan
“This will be our reply to violence:
to make music more intensely,
more beautifully,
more devotedly than ever before.”
―Leonard Bernstein
Mockingbird Chronicles 