Thank you to everyone who joined us for this session!

Our text for this session was the poem “Vespers” by Louise Glück, posted below.

Our prompt was: “Write about longing.”

More details about this session will be posted soon, so check back!

Participants are warmly encouraged to share what you wrote below (“Leave a Reply”), to keep the conversation going here, bearing in mind that the blog of course is a public space where confidentiality is not assured.

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Please join us for our next session Monday, December 7th at 6pm EST, with more times listed on our Live Virtual Group Sessions page.

 Vespers by Louise Glück
  
 Once I believed in you; I planted a fig tree.
 Here, in Vermont, country
 of no summer. It was a test: if the tree lived,
 it would mean you existed.
  
 By this logic, you do not exist. Or you exist
 exclusively in warmer climates,
 in fervent Sicily and Mexico and California,
 where are grown the unimaginable
 apricot and fragile peach. Perhaps
 they see your face in Sicily; here we barely see
 the hem of your garment. I have to discipline myself
 to share with John and Noah the tomato crop.
  
 If there is justice in some other world, those
 like myself, whom nature forces
 into lives of abstinence, should get
 the lion's share of all things, all
 objects of hunger, greed being
 praise of you. And no one praises
 more intensely than I, with more
 painfully checked desire, or more deserves
 to sit at your right hand, if it exists, partaking
 of the perishable, the immortal fig,
 which does not travel. 

Louise Glück, “Vespers [once I believed in you]” 
from The Wild Iris. 
Copyright ©1992 by Louise Glück.