Live Virtual Group Session: 12PM EST January 21st 2022

6 Comments

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.

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

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?

6 thoughts on “Live Virtual Group Session: 12PM EST January 21st 2022”

  1. Scarlet Kinney

    Prompt: What Was or What Will Be

    Once
    As we stood on the rockbound coast
    Watching a wild August storm
    Rolling towards us from far at sea,
    We sang to the wind
    And we sang to the sea
    And the wind and the sea spoke to us
    And rivers of light and sound
    Danced along our spines.
    Oh, that the wind and the sea
    Would hear my song again.

    Liked by 1 person

    Reply
      • Scarlet Kinney

        Thanks Michele! Few people notice, and not sure why – perhaps because I was trained as a dancer from a very young age – but the rhythm of what I write is very important to me. Sometimes I check what I write for that. Just checked this one, and it reads to a plain 4/4 beat. Sometimes I read my writing to the accompaniment of drumming.

        Liked by 1 person

  2. michele348

    About what was or what will be~~~

    Do we evolve or do we stay locked in the past?
    Our world is such that we are bombarded by distractions and discontents.
    Our planet is under siege by our lack of respect for its finiteness.
    Our world is on its knees by a microscopic entity.
    Brothers against brothers, sisters against sisters over what?
    Do we realize that we are all part of the same race– the human race?

    For us to survive, for us to thrive, we must evolve into a new normal,
    adapting to whatever needs to be adapted to.
    This requires a modicum of courage, but courage we must have.
    Changing hearts, changing minds will allow us to maneuver forward onto the path ahead.

    Liked by 1 person

    Reply
  3. Scarlet Kinney

    I love this, because it speaks so eloquently to the transition we’re facing, suggested by Janus in today’s poem, and to the necessity of many, many people being willing and able to navigate the transition. Many of us are thinking like you, of the whole, but many are thinking only of themselves, to the point that I sometimes wonder if the human race is approaching a new critical evolutionary crossroads, at which some will go one way, and some the other, the question being, which road will lead to the survival of our species?

    Liked by 1 person

    Reply
  4. Trisha

    Prompt: Write about what was or what will be

    Doris Day’s mother said que sera sera: Whatever will be, will be. My mother shared this lesson with me, through her love of Alfred Hitchcock movies. This one stared that actor who went to Washington and made a stand. In the movie, their son had been kidnapped. Doris Day’s singing brought her son home. He heard his mother’s voice and found his way home. I sing to my absent son every night before bed. Waiting, in the quiet after, I strain to hear my mother’s voice, calling me home. Still in silence, what will be, will be.

    Liked by 1 person

    Reply

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