Thank you to everyone who joined us for this session!

For this session we read a poem “Characteristics of Life” by Camille T. Dungy, posted below.

Our prompt was: “Write of an impossible hope.”

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 April 28th at 6pm EDT, with more times listed on our Live Virtual Group Sessions.

Characteristics of Life  by Camille T. Dungy

A fifth of animals without backbones could be at risk of extinction, say scientists.
—BBC Nature News

       Ask me if I speak for the snail and I will tell you
I speak for the snail.
                         I speak of underneathedness
and the welcome of mosses,
                                       of life that springs up,
little lives that pull back and wait for a moment.
 
I speak for the damselfly, water skeet, mollusk,
the caterpillar, the beetle, the spider, the ant.
                                                       I speak
from the time before spinelessness was frowned upon.
 
Ask me if I speak for the moon jelly. I will tell you
                       one thing today and another tomorrow
       and I will be as consistent as anything alive
on this earth.
 
                       I move as the currents move, with the breezes.
What part of your nature drives you? You, in your cubicle
ought to understand me. I filter and filter and filter all day.
 
Ask me if I speak for the nautilus and I will be silent
as the nautilus shell on a shelf. I can be beautiful
and useless if that's all you know to ask of me.
 
Ask me what I know of longing and I will speak of distances
       between meadows of night-blooming flowers.
                                                       I will speak
                       the impossible hope of the firefly.
 
                                               You with the candle
burning and only one chair at your table must understand
       such wordless desire.
 
                               To say it is mindless is missing the point.

Copyright Credit: "Characteristics of Life” from Trophic Cascade © 2017 by Camille Dungy. Published by Wesleyan University Press. Used by permission.
Source: Trophic Cascade (Wesleyan University Press, 2017)