Thank you to everyone who joined us for this session!

For this session we took a close listen to “I’ll Fly Away” by Albert E. Brumley, posted below.

Our prompt was: “Start with ‘I’ll fly away.’”

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 Friday May 19th at 12pm EDT, with more times listed on our Live Virtual Group Sessions.

"I’ll Fly Away" by Albert E. Brumley

Thank you to everyone who joined us for this session!

For this session we took a close look at an image from “Guillermo del Toro, Pinocchio (2022)” and read a poem published in Sappho: One Hundred Lyrics (Chatto and Windus, 1907), posted below.

Our prompt was: Write beginning with the words “ Dear Sappho.”

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 Friday May 12th at 12pm EDT, with more times listed on our Live Virtual Group Sessions.

XII
	Sappho 
 
In a dream I spoke with the Cyprus-born,
      And said to her,
"Mother of beauty, mother of joy,
Why hast thou given to men
 
 
"This thing called love, like the ache of a wound
      In beauty's side,
To burn and throb and be quelled for an hour
And never wholly depart?"
 
And the daughter of Cyprus said to me,
      "Child of the earth,
Behold, all things are born and attain,
But only as they desire,—
 
"The sun that is strong, the gods that are wise,
     The loving heart,
Deeds and knowledge and beauty and joy,—
But before all else was desire.

This poem was published in Sappho: One Hundred Lyrics (Chatto and Windus, 1907), translated by Bliss Carman.

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.

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 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)

Thank you to everyone who joined us for this session!

For this session we read a poem “Instructions on Not Giving Up” by Ada Limón, posted below.

Our prompt was: “Start with ‘I’ll take it all.’”

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 Friday May 5th at 12pm EDT, with more times listed on our Live Virtual Group Sessions.

"Instructions on Not Giving Up" by Ada Limón

More than the fuchsia funnels breaking out
of the crabapple tree, more than the neighbor’s
almost obscene display of cherry limbs shoving
their cotton candy-colored blossoms to the slate
sky of Spring rains, it’s the greening of the trees
that really gets to me. When all the shock of white
and taffy, the world’s baubles and trinkets, leave
the pavement strewn with the confetti of aftermath,
the leaves come. Patient, plodding, a green skin
growing over whatever winter did to us, a return
to the strange idea of continuous living despite
the mess of us, the hurt, the empty. Fine then,
I’ll take it, the tree seems to say, a new slick leaf
unfurling like a fist to an open palm, I’ll take it all.

Copyright © 2017 by Ada Limón. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on May 15, 2017, by the Academy of American Poets.

Thank you to everyone who joined us to celebrate our *300th* virtual group session!

For this session we read a poem “Small Kindnesses” by Danusha Laméris, posted below.

Our prompt was: “Begin with the word ‘Strangers…‘”

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 Friday April 28th at 12pm EDT, with more times listed on our Live Virtual Group Sessions.

"Small Kindnesses" by Danusha Laméris        
 
I’ve been thinking about the way, when you walk
down a crowded aisle, people pull in their legs
to let you by. Or how strangers still say “bless you”
when someone sneezes, a leftover
from the Bubonic plague. “Don’t die,” we are saying.
And sometimes, when you spill lemons
from your grocery bag, someone else will help you
pick them up. Mostly, we don’t want to harm each other.
We want to be handed our cup of coffee hot,
and to say thank you to the person handing it. To smile
at them and for them to smile back. For the waitress
to call us honey when she sets down the bowl of clam chowder,
and for the driver in the red pick-up truck to let us pass.
We have so little of each other, now. So far
from tribe and fire. Only these brief moments of exchange.
What if they are the true dwelling of the holy, these
fleeting temples we make together when we say, “Here,
have my seat,” “Go ahead—you first,” “I like your hat.”

The New York Times (9/19/2019),   Bonfire Opera

Thank you to everyone who joined us for this session!

For this session we read a poem “On the Road Home” by Wallace Stevens, posted below.

Our prompt was: “Begin with… ‘it was when you said.’”

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 April 17th at 6pm EDT, with more times listed on our Live Virtual Group Sessions.

"On the Road Home" by Wallace Stevens

It was when I said,
“There is no such thing as the truth,”
That the grapes seemed fatter.
The fox ran out of his hole.

You . . . You said
“There are many truths,
But they are not parts of a truth.”
Then the tree, at night, began to change,

Smoking through green and smoking blue.
We were two figures in a wood.
We said we stood alone.

It was when I said,
“Words are not forms of a single word.
In the sum of the parts, there are only the parts.
The world must be measured by eye”;

It was when you said,
“The idols have seen lots of poverty,
Snakes and gold and lice,
But not the truth”;

It was at that time, that the silence was largest
And longest, the night was roundest,
The fragrance of the autumn warmest,
Closest and strongest.

Credit: Wallace Stevens. 

Thank you to everyone who joined us for this session!

For this session we took a close look at “La Flor Blanca (1944)” by José A. Bencomo Mena, posted below.

Our prompt was: “Write about finding peace when danger lurks.”

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 April 10th at 6pm EDT, with more times listed on our Live Virtual Group Sessions.

“La Flor Blanca (1944)” by José A. Bencomo Mena

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