National Poetry Month: Day Eight–Introductions
Here’s another prompt inspired by a Facebook game. Look up the meanings of your names, and introduce yourself formally, using the meanings, as a poem. Don’t like your name or its meaning? Make up something grand sounding. Give yourself a new name. Create a whole identity. Begin “I am. . .”
Loosely working with the definitions of my names,
I am the Oath of the Holy One,
I am the Graceful Eagle,
I am the Creator of Tapestries,
I am the One Who Clear the Land for Farming.
Gratitudes:
1. Driving down Ducktown, into the open, suddenly there is a sea of pink blossoms as Flinchbaugh’s Orchards spread out in front of you.
2. Across the road from the orchards, several frilly weeping cherries twirl their dresses in the wind.
3. At the bottom of Ducktown, a row of flaming forsythia sets the tree row aflame.
4. Turn right onto Lincoln Highway and a grand magnolia is beginning to explode into bloom.
5. Turn left onto Burg’s Lane, and a tapestry of richly saturated purple dead nettle calls for your attention.
May we walk in Color!
“On the whole, I do not find Christians, outside of the catacombs, sufficiently sensible of conditions. Does anyone have the foggiest idea what sort of power we so blithely invoke? Or, as I suspect, does no one believe a word of it? The churches are children playing on the floor with their chemistry sets, mixing up a batch of TNT to kill a Sunday morning. It is madness to wear ladies’ straw hats and velvet hats to church; we should all be wearing crash helmets. Ushers should issue life preservers and signal flares; they should lash us to our pews. For the sleeping god may wake someday and take offense, or the waking god may draw us out to where we can never return.” —Annie Dillard in Teaching a Stone to Talk
“For instance, on the planet Earth, man had always assumed that he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so much—the wheel, New York, wars and so on—whilst all the dolphins had ever done was muck about in the water having a good time. But conversely, the dolphins had always believed that they were far more intelligent than man—for precisely the same reasons.” ―Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
“Where there’s life there’s hope, and need of vittles.” ―JRR Tolkien
“We are the ones we have been waiting for.” ―June Jordan
“Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.” ―Albert Einstein
“We are all the leaves of one tree.
We are all the waves of one sea.” ―Thich Nhat Hanh
“It is respectable to have no illusions―and safe―and profitable and dull.” ―Joseph Conrad
“I would like to beg you dear Sir, as well as I can, to have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don’t search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.” ―Rainer Maria Rilke
“Our job is to love others without stopping to inquire whether they are worthy.” —Thomas Merton
Mockingbird Chronicles 