Thank you to everyone who joined us for this session!

For this session we read a poem “Ending the Estrangement” by Ross Gay, posted below.

Our prompt was: “Write about ending an estrangement.”

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 May 8th at 6pm EDT, with more times listed on our Live Virtual Group Sessions.

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"Ending the Estrangement" by Ross Gay

from my mother's sadness, which was,
to me, unbearable, until,
it felt to me 
not like what I thought it felt like
to her, and so felt inside myself—like death,
like dying, which I would almost
have rather done, though adding to her sadness
would rather die than do—
but, by sitting still, like what, in fact, it was—
a form of gratitude
which when last it came
drifted like a meadow lit by torches
of cardinal flower, one of whose crimson blooms,
when a hummingbird hovered nearby,
I slipped into my mouth
thereby coaxing the bird
to scrawl on my tongue
its heart's frenzy, its fleet
nectar-questing song,
with whom, with you, dear mother,
I now sing along.

Ross Gay, "Ending the Estrangement" from Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude. Copyright © 2015 by Ross Gay.  Reprinted by permission of University of Pittsburgh Press.
Source: Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2015)