Today’s Prompt on Poetic Asides is to write a Lucky Number poem. My thirteen lines have thirteen syllables each. I might call the form thirteen squared.
Thirteen white pebbles in a woven nettle basket. Thirteen striped feathers floating on the gentle spring breeze. Thirteen tiny minnows circling in a shallow creek.
You’ve drawn the Death card, which is also Transformation. One cycle is ending; another is beginning.
Ouroboros, Jormundgand, and Damballa Wedo: Whatever you call it, the World Serpent eats its tail, delineating a universe, shaping a world, separating the outer space from the inner space.
Don’t take no as your final answer. Don’t give up now. The hardest push comes just before the moment of birth. The final moment of surrender to the process is the moment that the light of the new world shines in.
Today’s Poetic Asides prompt is to write a poem on the subject of jealousy. I don’t know that I experience that particular emotion much. Perhaps I am not being honest with myself?
Though I would love to defy gravity with the grace of an acrobat or ballerina, how can I be jealous? For jealousy fogs the windows of appreciation, and pulls my soul’s feet downward just as surely as my physical body rests solidly on earth, and I want to let my spirit fly with those who can.
And how can I be jealous of the artist whose line is so eloquent that a single curve or bend can draw me to tears? I long to place my truths within the webs of line and color as great artists do, but jealousy would push me off the ladder I am climbing toward them in their lofty realms.
Sometimes I read a line of perfect thought in poetry or prose and think, “I wish I’d written that!” But even that distracts me from the beauty of the word, and pulls me out of that co-creative space wherein the writer tosses out a thread of meaning and the reader reels it in, and both are necessary for the literary process to be complete.
Oh, I get jealous of other people’s tidy spaces, their immaculate houses that never break down, their ability to get everything done in timely ways. But would I trade my life for theirs? Would I then be satisfied? Or would I ride out of that upgrade into the next, never learning to be content?
May I always remain unsettled enough that I continue seeking better ways, but may my days be filled not with wishing for another train, but with loving what is mine, and treasuring the marvelous gifts that others have and know and do.
After all is said and done, when you’ve won the battle, when you catch your breath and stretch your fingers to the sun,
will you still believe in all the words and songs that led you to your path? Will you remember all the guides who walked beside you in the lonesome days?
Will you praise the small coincidences of the wayside trees that brought you comfort, and the sort of incidental shining stones that made a trail for you to follow?
After the dust has settled, after the room has stopped spinning, after the dice have rolled the magic number, will you stumble onward blindly
in the noonday glare, or will you pause and rest a moment, give a knowing glance toward the river and the willows, the pebbles and the flaming trees of spring?
Will you sing a grateful poem to the day? Will you kneel? Will you build an altar? Will you dance? Will you pray?
Gratitude List: 1. Phoebe calling 2. Bluebird muttering 3. Fixing things 4. Water 5. Poeming
I drew this back at the end of February, when I finally began to feel that awful weight of winter shifting just the lightest bit.
Today’s prompt on Poetic Asides is to write a stolen poem. Here’s my attempt:
Poetry Prompt: Write a Stolen Poem
I stole this poem years ago, actually, from a shelf in a corner of that old book shop on a quiet street down by the river. Dust motes twinkled in shafts of sun which slanted through the windows.
I eased the leather-clad book from a high shelf. I thought I heard it whispering. My fingers tingled with its electric pull.
I knew it would contain treasures: words like glisten and linger, like numinous, mellow, meringue. I thought it might glow on the page, hum my name, offer me words to ponder: tendril, exquisite, winsome, wander. And words strong and feral, like flame, wild, and bramble, courageous, incarnate, sycamore.
I thought it might tell me how not to be afraid, how to not put so much stake in other people’s opinions, how not to trust the lure of the the easiest road.
It did not disappoint. I’ve kept it, concealed, waiting for the moment, the right invitation, to reveal it.
In today’s prompt, Brewer suggests titling a poem with the name of a painter and then writing the poem.
Artemisia Gentileschi
The magical properties of artemisia absinthium include the opening of the third eye, general enhancement of psychic awareness, profound protection, and the banishment of anger and negativity. If you steep it in your vodka with some anise and fennel, you might see a fairy dressed in green.
The name didn’t save her, though, unless it brought her the visions, showed her the most vibrant color for blood, gave her the fire to hold to her truth when they tightened the screws to her artful thumbs.
The paintings are angry enough– there’s little evidence that emotion was banished from her soul, but Judith’s eyes hold something else– a knowing? a determination? a getting down to business?–as she severs the general’s head. And her handmaid is equally attentive to the task. They could be butchering a cow.
Likewise, Jael looks meditative as she holds the hammer aloft to drive the spike into the skull of Sisera. She could be gazing into the watery vision of a crystal ball or tucking in a sleeping child.
That anger, unbanished, transformed itself to purpose, exposing the sins of the patriarchs, showing the bloody strength of women doing what must be done.
Her colors were her arsenal, those tortured hands wielding her paintbrushes like weapons. She mined the hidden stories of the Bible to tell and retell her own story: observer, victim, vanquisher, and hero. In the end, perhaps, her name revealed the layers she could look into.
Lichen on a branch like a lace doily on the arm of a grandmother’s chair.
Brewer’s prompt today is to write an animal poem. As usual, when I leave the poem until the end of the day, my mind has scrambled down too many tunnels to form a coherent poem.
On the green carpet, a golden patch of sunlight. A question-mark cat.
It’s another April. This year, grades were due at 8 a.m. on April first, so I didn’t even consider Poem-a-Day until after I’d muddled my way through the day, taken a nap, and eaten supper. But here I am. It’s a strange compulsion, this drive to write a daily poem, knowing that the next four weeks will have their own share of other stresses, that there will come a day, mid-month, when I will hate the way poetry is holding the whip above my head, when I will write a grocery list and call it a poem, just to get through the day. But now, on the first day of the month, everything seems bright and shiny, and I feel up for anything.
Brewer’s prompt today is to write a morning poem. I worked up a photo of this morning’s magenta cloud in a blue sky to go with it.
Finishing the Grades
The battle cry of yesterday’s ghost startled me into morning at precisely 4:38 according to the clock, and as I couldn’t wrestle the monster back into oblivion, I strapped on the day like a rusty sword and went downstairs in the chilly dark, to coffee and a blue screen, to the silent dread of numbers on a page, and the certainty of this day’s wave of work receding, while the pull of the next wave began its undertow toward the rising sun.
During the season of Lent, the worship materials for the Mennonite Church suggest a more ritualized confession time, not particularly about confessing sin, but expanding it to confess what we believe. As part of the ritual, a few people each week are asked to come forward and bring their confessions in the form of a poem or a piece of art or a story or a reflection of some sort. Today, I have been asked to be part of the ritual, answering the question: “Who will trust in God today?” Here’s my poem:
Whom shall we trust?
When hurricanes and charlatans
destroy the weak?
When the meek are set
to inherit a world laid waste by greed?
When human need bats last,
long after lust for money, sex, and power?
Whom shall we trust
in this hour when so much has been lost?
When the cost seems too high
for such a simple thing
as resting in belief
that the Holy One has time
for grief about our trials and tribulations.
The pillars of the past no longer hold.
They’ve had feet of clay all along,
and wrong upon wrong upon wrong
has brought the ancient houses down.
There’s no more room here for illusion.
How, then, shall we trust?
Shall we just ignore the lancing fear
that tears our sense of safety from its moorings?
That bears us outward into territories
we’ve not known before?
Perhaps it’s not a matter
of ignoring what we face,
but rather an attempt
to place our anxious thoughts
within the context of the Greater Power.
I will put my trust in Mystery, in that ineffable presence we call God, in the Knowable Unknowing, and in the One who put on shoes like us and trod the roads we walk, and spoke as one who knew the course of human suffering. I’ll trust us to the Holy Wind of Spirit, who hears our songs and knows our fears, who causes us to rise, though we resist; in our resistance fills our sails, the wind that pulls against the kite and makes us rise to higher height.
Perhaps nothing can be truly known, no comfortable future gardens sown with seeds of certainty. But we can trust the certainty of seed, the trusty breeze of Spirit and the rains of the Creator on these fields we bear within us.
Gratitude List: 1. The Little Sisters buzzing for pollen among the crocus and anemones 2. A fun afternoon of pond play yesterday with my kid 3. This man who makes the most amazing birthday cakes 4. The opportunities for my soon-to-be-teenager to learn to do the tech things he loves 5. Summer break is on its way
We are two days in to the season of Awakening, of Hatching, of Breaking Open. Two days in, through wind and sunshowers, through gusting rain and rushing cloud. Last year, on the second day of spring, a foot of snow fell in the hollow. This year, a seemingly endless drench of rain.
In the season of Brigid, back in February, we felt the Earth stirring, noticed the sap rising, watched pull toward birth and sprouting. Now we feel the promise, watch the winter aconite drop seeds for next years golden cups, and Persephone’s footprints–all shades of crocus–springing up across the lawns, uncontainable by flower beds.
What, in you, is hatching now? What thing, which has lain long and silently within you like a seed in the darkness, now seeks the sun and breezes? Hold that thing within you, like a seed. See the rough, hard casing which has protected it in its dreamstate. Breathe in the sun of spring, the chill air biting as it enters, and feel your lungs, your belly, your capacity, expand. Watch the casing of your dreamseed break open, and feel the roots push downward within you. Feel the sprout nosing upwards to the light and warmth of spring. What is being born within you? What new capacity? What new heartspace? What plan and purpose? Blessed be your seeds. Crack open. Seek the sun. Feel the rains of spring caress your growing roots.
Gratitude List: 1. The groundhog who is nosing around on the hillside behind the house 2. A day off, to ponder and paint, and catch up on the work 3. The fog of winter is lifting 4. Watching the children grow and become so gallantly themselves 5. The seeds which are sprouting
Every storyteller knows you have to find your pacing. You might fill that page with skin-of-their-teeth escapes, but eventually, you need to get your hero to Lothlorien, or back to the arms of her friends, or into the warm presence of Aslan.
Pace your story. Find your way through the nail biter, and then descend into the valley of your Rivendell: tea and silence, a quiet book, a walk beside the river, an evening in company with your best beloveds.
Mockingbird Chronicles 