Today, write a poem about accountability and consequences. Or make an acrostic poem about JUSTICE. Or try your hand at a credo poem, expressing what kind of society you want to be part of. Perhaps write a letter to the future, explaining what future you have been trying to manifest here and now. You could take a verse—like “Let justice roll down like waters”—and use it as your epigraph, or as a repeated phrase in a chant poem. Find a picture of the blind goddess Justice with her scales, or the tarot card Justice with scales and two-edged sword, and write a poem about justice personified.
Gratitude List:
1. Finally, justice. It’s a hard gratitude, not a soft one, like blossoms and birdsong, because a man is dead, and now yet another black child is dead, and we still have so much work to do, but one step toward a change has been made. Now we work.
2. Collage, quilting, mosaics, found poetry, creating a life: taking pieces and fragments and putting them together to create beauty.
3. Okay, blossoms and birdsong. They’re soft, but they’re also–some days–the crumbs on the pathway that help me find my way.
4. Reflections. Light on the windows. The suggestions of worlds within worlds. Worlds beyond worlds. They way you reflect me, and I reflect you.
5. Smoothies. For some reason, I never really want them in the winter, but spring and summer bring smoothie weather. I look forward to berry season.
May we walk in Beauty!
“Buying a book is not about obtaining a possession. . .but about securing a portal.” —Laura Miller
“I’m writing a first draft and reminding myself that I’m simply shoveling sand into a box so that later I can build castles.” ―Shannon Hale
“I can promise you that women working together―linked, informed, and educated―can bring peace and prosperity to this forsaken planet.” ―Isabel Allende
“Everybody needs beauty as well as bread, places to play in and pray in, where nature may heal and give strength to body and soul alike.” ―John Muir
“When we went to jail, we were setting our faces against the world, against things as they are, the terrible injustice of our capitalist industrial system which lives by war and by preparing for war.” ―Dorothy Day
“What is not acceptable is silence in face of oppression. Boycott if you want, or participate if you want. But do not remain silent in face of injustice.” ―Omid Safi
“When we walk on the earth with reverence, beauty will decide to trust us. The rushed heart and arrogant mind lack the gentleness and patience to enter that embrace.” ―John O’Donohue
“Beauty is an experience, nothing else. It is not a fixed pattern or an arrangement of features. It is something felt, a glow or a communicated sense of fineness. What ails us is our sense of beauty is so bruised and blunted, we miss all the best.” ―D. H. Lawrence
“Poems are maps to the place where you already are.” —Jane Hirshfield
“Be still, and the world is bound to turn herself inside out to entertain you. Everywhere you look, joyful noise is clanging to drown out quiet desperation. The choice is to draw the blinds and shut it all out, or believe.” ―Barbara Kingsolver
“Trees are sanctuaries. Whoever knows how to speak to them, whoever knows how to listen to them, can learn the truth. They do not preach learning and precepts, they preach, undeterred by particulars, the ancient law of life.” ―Hermann Hesse
Mockingbird Chronicles 