Today’s prompt is to write an echo poem.  This is a gift.  I have been frustrated this month with the way I have struggled to settle back into my voice.  I know that writing a poem a day means that many will be junk, but I can’t seem to find the threads of myself in my writing this month.  Two days ago, I felt it again, that sense that I was in the poem, finally.  And yesterday, I desperately wanted to hold it, but it just unraveled.

But today, the prompt is to write an echo poem.  He suggested that an echo might be a re-vision of an earlier poem, or perhaps a response to an earlier poem.  I am trying to work out both of those–to echo Monday’s poem and to revise yesterday’s.  I think I have almost accomplished it.  It’s going to need some more revision work, but it’s definitely finding its way.

Love, she leads me out in the street,
leaving History muttering to herself
in the corner booth of the cafe.

“How can we fix her?” I ask, but Love
is silent.  She points her finger down the street,
where sun is streaming golden through the leaves
falling from a yellow maple.  “Don’t you just–”
she asks, “love that?”  And Yes fills me,
and a shining thread stretches golden
from us to the tree.  “And that?”  She points
to children racing higgledy-piggledy down the sidewalk.
Laughter echoes off the walls.  I nod and see
the glimmering thread between us.

A tired-eyed mother carrying her child.  Yes.
Pigeons fighting for a crust of bread.
Pigeons, yes.  Bread, yes.
A self-assured pup pulling his woman on a leash.
Dog.  Woman.  Her violet eyes.  The shifting shades
of red and russet in her woven stole.  Yes, and yes,
and yes again.  And yes to the man sleeping on the grate,
and the girl who has brought him a cup of steaming coffee.

A glittering web fills the square, shifting in the sunlight,
quivering in the breathing spaces between us all.

“Ah!” I sigh.  I see it now.  “This is how
we untangle History
from her self-repeating cycle!
Cast the web and revel in its shine!”
But Love is not yet smiling.

“There!” She points to a battered crow,
holes in the fringes of its wings,
winging home from warring with an owl.
“Even that,” I say.  “It is the way of crows,
of owls.  I love the crow.” The web is cast
between us.  Voices rise as we pass
through shadows, marching feet in lock-step.

Love points–“And those?”
Like the crows, perhaps, it is the way
of sheep to follow wolves.  And yet,
the web has faltered slightly,
gone grey and wispy, sagging,
but intact.  I hear History whispering,
“Inevitability, Sister.”  Still, my heart
can see around the edges, hold the strands.
I have done this work before.

But Love points again, this time
to the leader himself, the leering
lying demagogue, leading the sheep
to their doom, to ours.  A babbling buffoon–

The web is falling, tangling around me.
“And this one?” Love looks on, solemn-eyed:
“I think you see that here is where your work begins.”

Gratitude List:
1. Tabula rasa.  Sometimes you get a do-over on a clean sheet.
2. Binge-watching The West Wing.
3. The goldfinches twittering in the sunlight.
4. Sunlight.
5. Sleeping in.  My body let me sleep until 6, and then I managed to doze until after 7.  Glorious.  I might take a nap, too.

May we walk in Beauty!

 

Erf. Today’s prompt is to write a technology/anti-technology poem. I love to rant about technology, but I don’t know if I can whip up a poem about it in the fifteen minutes before I have to leave for school.  It’ll have to be a place-holder.

See how it serves you?
The world at your fingertips,
and that such a thrill
that we miss the cliche.

See how it frees you?
All that you need
right there in your hand.
You’re never more
than the press of a button
away from work or diversion,
but the one who breathes beside you
is now a thousand clicks away.

Gratitude List:
1. How the valleys and hollows hold the early morning mist
2. How people hold each other
3. How eyes shine with a new idea
4. How the work just gets done
5. How the air comes alive when the children sing

May we walk in Beauty!

This morning, I played catch-up, and finished the two incomplete poems for the poem-a-day challenge.  Today’s prompt is to write about a mistake, which is also a writing prompt that I have given my students today, with some great philosophical success–I wrote along with them, and this poem has emerged.

Red ink rains blood
upon the white page.
A slash, a laceration,
opening the wounded sentence
like a scalpel:
scribble, cut, and blot.
Ink on my fingers.

You should know there is
no glee in this.

My ink will run green
across the furrowed page,
teasing growth from the tender rows
of font upon the white field.
Nurture and cultivate,
seeds of new knowledge
sprouting from the even lines.
Your thoughts given form
and reaching for the sun.

Gratitude List:
1. Sleep.  After an intensely busy week/weekend, and before another intensely busy week, I had one L-O-N-G night of sleep.  Joss and I fell asleep while we were reading A Swiftly Tilting Planet up in my bed, and I slept through until morning.
2. Those morning planets hanging out together.
3. The rhythm of work and rest.
4. Grandma Slabaugh’s Apple Cake.  Someone say the recipe I posted on Facebook, made it, and sent me a slice.
5. Restoration.  Redemption.  Making things right.  Always keeping open the possibilities for wholeness.
6. The right to vote.

May we walk in Compassion.

Yesterday tended to be a little overwhelming in so many ways.  Mostly in that joyous, sort of out-of-body way that happens at any marvelous beginning.  It was delightful to be back in that garden of shining flowers, all those eager and timid and excited and anxious faces.  Each one carrying a web of associations and connections.

The heat, also, was overwhelming.  I think of myself as pretty tough in a hot situation, but it did almost conquer me by seventh period.   I need to drink more, I suppose.  The thought of adding another fan on top of my air conditioning unit and my other fan makes my voice ache.  I need to do some more strategizing about how to manage it.  I’ll use the computer labs every time they’re free, for one, though students tend to focus on the computer rather than on the other types of work when we’re in the labs.

Gratitude List:
1. There might be rain today–perhaps a break in the heat?
2. All those beautiful faces.
3. Being in a place where the work is the Work.
4. Beginning with a three-day week–slow starts.
5. My own children seem to have had a wonderful start to their year, too.

May we walk in Beauty!

A Gratitude List
Focuses My Inner Space
On the Essentials

1. I dream of a blue
blue sky–blue as Mary’s robe
or the Farmer’s eye.

2. The roadside teasel–
abloom among Queen Anne’s Lace
and the Sweet Joe Pye.

3. This is how I’ll find
my way in the dark forest:
I’ll seek your heart’s light.

4. I am finding time
to fill a bag of silence,
a bag of patience.

5. Careful summer work
today finds its quiet end:
time to change the gears.

Let’s walk in Beauty,
and joyfully together,
on this path forward.

Gratitude List:
1. Feeding my sweet tooth
2. That fingernail moon
3. Stones
4. Feathers
5. That waiting moment between breaths

May we walk in Beauty!

Following is the final installment of collaborative Blessing Poems written by one of my classes.

Blessing (three)

May God’s grace carry us
as we go forth into our summers.
I hope we all have time to breathe and laugh.
May you always have food on your table
and family in your home.

Wishing you a great summer.
The world is your Oyster.
You’ve got it!
You can, if you think you can.
Everything is going to be okay.
May everyone be free
of the anxiety of test-taking.

May your days be sunny
and your refrigerator full of food.
May your summer be the best one yet.
May the sun shine brighter
and the lemonade taste tastier
and you sit back and enjoy
the summer nights’ fresh air.

May you remember to smile.
May you laugh deeply and from the belly
with so much joy that it hurts.

I hope you don’t fall into darkness.
May you find happiness and success
in all your endeavors.
May the rain wash away all your fears
and may the sun replace them with adventure.

May life bring you morning flowers
that make you smile away, but
don’t forget about the rainy days
that make those flowers.

May you make a huge difference
in somebody’s life.
Make that difference a positive one.

May you live in good spirits
and have peace in your heart.
May you find joy deep in your heart.

“May the Lord show his mercy upon you.
May the light of his presence be your guide.
May he love you and uphold you.
May his spirit be ever at your side.”  –John Rutter

May the Lord bless you and keep you.
May he make his face shine upon you,
now and forevermore.  Amen.

Dear Shining Souls,
I am ready to give up on us right about now.
Not you.  Not me.  Us: humanity.
Some days, I just can’t find my way
through the forest of horrors.

But how can I stay here in these dark woods
when those who lost the most
are already walking into the green fields of grace,
hands extended in forgiveness?

Oh Dear and Shining Souls.
People.  I keep forgetting
that we’re such a mixed bag.
Sometimes our worst
shows us our best.

I will follow those families
out into the sunlight
and hope to learn grace.

At least for now,
I will join this circle.
Take my hand,
and we will watch
those nine bright birds
wheeling in the sky above us.

Today I couldn’t find my classroom keys.  I never lose my keys.  The reason is simply because I used to always lose my keys, so I found particular ways to cope.  My system failed today.  Sandra was here, and she said a prayer to Saint Anthony, Finder of Lost Things.  I didn’t find my classroom keys right away, but I did find that macaw feather.  Maybe the good saint gives you what you most need.

That feather means more than it means.

Earlier this week, I spent three days at a local Jesuit Monastery.  Here are some excerpts from my Monastery writings:

 

 

6-15-15: Wernersville, Jesuit Center

I am here.  Slipping deliberately sideways into a pocket of moment–three days of time sustained.  I have not come for silence, exactly, but for solitude.  My chamber or cell is room 266, on the corner, so I have two windows for a slightly angled cross breeze.  One window looks toward the Mary grotto, and the other faces a courtyard where a female saint stands.  I need to look up the symbols so I can learn her name.  When I first arrived, I sat in the chair and listened to a lengthy catbird concert from the pine outside my window.  Later, I looked down into the front garden from a second floor alcove, as the singer bathed himself energetically in the courtyard fountain.  I felt like a voyeur.

The experience of eating alone is a different kind of communion, communing with myself and with those who produced and prepared the food.  Eating slowly and deliberately.

In the short hours I have been here, I have found myself returning repeatedly to that word: deliberately.  I have had to deliberately restrain myself from dashing excitedly from alcove to alcove and from courtyard to courtyard like a child exploring.  So today will be for exploring–at a much less frantic pace–settling my spirit into this place.

Excitement is a jarring word–a somewhat jarring emotion, too–in the context of this serenity.  Still, this has been such a long time coming, and I am so filled with delight to be finally here that I am excited.  So excited that my hands shook as I set out my little altar space on the desk in my chamber.  I am learning to balance the thrill of having made it to this time and this space with the peace that I am building within.

Silence.  Filled with birdsong.

There will be at least one nap in these days, a “task” recommended to me by my father, and he is a spiritual director, so I shall not argue with that one.

This place is grand and wing-y enough to get satisfyingly lost in.  When I lose direction, I find my way to stairs, which are anchors that always seem to bring me back to familiar places.

On the lawn across the drive from the statue of Saint Ignatius the Pilgrim is a massive Weeping Beech tree.  Is she forty feet high?  Perhaps.  And her branches sweep the ground, some of them curving back upward again into light.  The space beneath her is a secret cathedral.  A photograph could hardly hope to hint at her sun-dappled mystery, her holy sense of sanctuary.  I removed my shoes.  I found feather there, from a hawk-kill.  The fierce ones must eat, too.  In her tangled roots are small pools of water.  Her pools contain visions for those who will see.  I thought I heard a voice which said, “Do not be afraid to live into your power.  Do not be afraid.  Do not be afraid.  Do not be afraid.”  Afterward, I climbed up into her branches and rested there.

   

Later in the day, as I was reading, I came upon this quotation of Audre Lorde’s: “When I dare to be powerful, to use my strength in the service of my vision, then it becomes less and less important whether I am afraid.”

And then this one, from Toko-pa: “In the Quechua tradition, when you feel grateful, you say, ‘There is a small bird in my heart.'”

So many, many little birds in my heart.

May we walk in Beauty!