Today’s prompt is to write a struggle poem. I decided to add some challenge (something to struggle with) and make an acrostic.
Shrug your shoulders or pull out your hair,
Try to pound a tunnel through the mountain, or
Run away and hide, life will always be a struggle.
Unless you find a way to pay the piper, or
Give the Ferrywoman her coin, or
Grow a handful of magic beans, or
Live with what is instead of what could have been, or
Eventually find yourself home within the struggle itself.
Gratitude List:
1. My brave colleague who took on tie-dying t-shirts with our eleven middle division students. I have never done this, much less with young people, and she dived right in. What a good model of a fun teacher and an excellent pedagogue!
2. That red tree out behind the school. Everyone else has gone to naked November, and she is still a rich red.
3. The way my students listen to poetry. I read part of The Beauty way for them today, and mostly, they seemed to get it.
4. That golden slant of light in November afternoons.
5. Brownies
May we walk in Beauty!
“We’ve got to be as clear-headed about human beings as possible, because we are still each other’s only hope.” ―James Baldwin
“Poets are kind of like—it’s a bad metaphor, but—canaries in a coal mine. They have a sense for things that are in the air. Partly because that’s what they do—they think about things that are going on—but partly because they take their own personal experience and see how that fits in with what they see in the world. A lot of people might think that poetry is very abstract, or that it has to do with having your head in the clouds, but poets, actually, walk on the earth. They’re grounded, feet-first, pointing forward. They’re moving around and paying attention at every moment.” —Don Share
“This is precisely the time when artists go to work. There is no time for despair, no place for self-pity, no need for silence, no room for fear. We speak, we write, we do language. That is how civilizations heal.” —Toni Morrison
“We need poets to change the world.” —Justin Trudeau
“…Accept what comes from silence.
Make the best you can of it.
Of the little words that come
out of the silence, like prayers
prayed back to the one who prays,
make a poem that does not disturb
the silence from which it came.”
—from “How to Be a Poet (to remind myself)” by Wendell Berry
Morning Prayer
by Phillip Newell
In the silence of the morning
your Spirit hovers over the brink of the day
and a new light pieces the darkness of the night.
In the silence of the morning
life begins to stir around me
and I listen for the day’s utterances.
In earth, sea and sky
and in the landscape of my own soul
I listen for utterances of your love, O God.
I listen for utterances of your love.
Mockingbird Chronicles 