Early in my time writing this blog, I joined the poets who follow Robert Brewer of Writers Digest to write a poem every day in November. I’m succeeding years, I think I’ve only missed one November of writing a daily poem.

Today’s prompt is to argue a declaration poem. I toyed with taking the words of the Preamble to the Declaration of Independence and rearranging them to say something about shattering the patriarchy and ridding the world of White supremacy. In the end, I came up with this little warm-up for the month:

Why do I hesitate to start
the declaration? I wait,
I stutter, I vacillate. I’d rather
pose it as a question, invite you
into the conversation,
collaborate our way
to a mutual solution.

It’s not that I lack confidence
in my opinions, or lack my own
self-evident truths. It’s just
that I know truth to be
a little slippery, a little loose,
and my own vision will always
be clearer with you as my mirror.

And here is what I came up with in my Preamble to the Declaration Poem:
I Found a Preamble

they Were ensLavers
they held women to be unequal

o thes truths self-eident, that all m are created , that ded by their Creator with certain alienable Rights, that aong se are ife, Libt and the pursuit of Happines.

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Gratitude List:

1. Inspiration

2. Anticipation

3. Sleep

4. Meeting goals

5. Wise friends

May we walk in Beauty!

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“I am passionate about everything in my life, first and foremost, passionate about ideas. And that’s a dangerous person to be in this society, not just because I’m a woman, but because it’s such a fundamentally anti-intellectual, anti-critical thinking society.” —bell hooks
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“Bless the light and the darkness, the love and the fear.” —Rabbi Olivier BenHaim
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“It doesn’t matter who you are or what you look like, so long as somebody loves you.” —Roald Dahl, The Witches
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“For women who are tied to the moon, love alone is not enough. We insist each day wrap its knuckles through our heart strings and pull. The lows, the joy, the poetry. We dance at the edge of a cliff. You have fallen off. So it goes. You will climb up again.” —Anais Nin
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“The creation of a thousand forests is in one acorn.” —Ralph Waldo Emerson
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“In the morning I went out to pick dandelions and was drawn to the Echinacea patch where I found a honeybee clinging to one of the pink flowers. She seemed in distress, confused and weak. She kept falling off the flower and then catching herself in midair and flying dizzily back. She kept trying to get back to work, to collect her pollen and nectar to take home to the hive to make honey but she was getting weaker and weaker and then she fell into my hand. I knew she would never make it back to her hive. For the next half hour she rested in my palm, her life slowly ebbing away as a thunderstorm started to brew. I sat on the earth waiting for death with her. The lightning flashed over the mountains, a family of turkeys slowly walked the ridge, a wild dog keyed into what was happening circled past us. The trees appeared startlingly vivid and conscious as the wind blew up and the thunder cracked and then her death was finished. She was gone forever. But in her going she taught me to take every moment as my last flower, do what I could and make something sweet of it.” —Layne Redmond
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“Let me seek, then, the gift of silence, and poverty, and solitude, where everything I touch is turned into prayer: where the sky is my prayer, the birds are my prayer, the wind in the trees is my prayer, for God is all in all.” —Thomas Merton
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“Beware; for I am fearless, and therefore powerful.” —Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, author of Frankenstein
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Audre Lorde:
“For women, then, poetry is not a luxury. It is a vital necessity of our existence. It forms the quality of the light within which we predicate our hopes and dreams toward survival and change, first made into language, then into idea, then into more tangible action.
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Poetry is the way we help give name to the nameless so it can be thought. The farthest external horizons of our hopes and fears are cobbled by our poems, carved from the rock experiences of our daily lives.
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As they become known and accepted to ourselves, our feelings, and the honest exploration of them, become sanctuaries and fortresses and spawning grounds for the most radical and daring of ideas, the house of difference so necessary to change and the conceptualization of any meaningful action. Right now, I could name at least ten ideas I would have once found intolerable or incomprehensible and frightening, except as they came after dreams and poems. This is not idle fantasy, but the true meaning of “it feels right to me.” We can train ourselves to respect our feelings, and to discipline (transpose) them into a language that matches those feelings so they can be shared. And where that language does not yet exist, it is our poetry which helps to fashion it. Poetry is not only dream or vision, it is the skeleton architecture of our lives.”
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“Wake at dawn with a winged heart and give thanks for another day of loving.” —Khalil Gibran
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Marge Piercy:
Forgive the dead year. Forgive
yourself. What will be wants
to push through your fingers.
The light you seek hides
in your belly. The light you
crave longs to stream from
your eyes. You are the moon
that will wax in new goodness.
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“Surrender is not passively resigning yourself to something. . .it is a conscious embracing of what is.” —Cynthia Bourgeault