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.”

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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.

"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)