Thank you to everyone who joined us for our this session!

For this session we close-read the poem January by Nancy Schoenberger, posted below.

The prompt for this session was: Write about what was or what will be.

More details will be posted on this session, so check back again!

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.

Also, we would love to learn more about your experience of these sessions, so if you’re able, please take the time to fill out a follow-up survey of one to two quick questions!

Please join us for our next session Monday January 24th at 6pm EST,  with more times listed on our Live Virtual Group Sessions page.

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January by Nancy Schoenberger

Two-faced god, looking fore and aft:
Do you really belong to past 
glories, boredoms, indignities?
Impossible to look forward to one's own death
so dwell on complaints, pleasures, disappointments.
Small things really: the taste of an apple  
from an orchard abandoned
thirty years earlier, when there were apples, 
there were trees, the disheveled orchard thrumming with yellow jackets.
 
But the January snow
has piled up, and even now 
the boggy  cottonwoods 
litter the hardened yard 
with detritus,
or rich harvest,
depending on your point of view, 
or diet.

You weep, Janus! Or is that laughter,
 though you have no daughters
in this, this baleful start 
to a new beginning,
a new life? You seem to be guarding 
something, brothers. One at each door.     
Is it the little secret of the new year:
 
that everything waiting for us up ahead       
will be exactly as it was before?