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.

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

Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes | Mediart | 2017 ©

Thank you to everyone who joined us for this session!

For this session we read a poem “The Lifeguard ” by James L. Dickey, posted below.

Our prompt was: “Stepping out from the earth onto the water, I ….”

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 7th at 12pm EDT, with more times listed on our Live Virtual Group Sessions.

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"The Lifeguard " by James L. Dickey

In a stable of boats I lie still,
From all sleeping children hidden.   
The leap of a fish from its shadow   
Makes the whole lake instantly tremble.   
With my foot on the water, I feel   
The moon outside

Take on the utmost of its power.
I rise and go out through the boats.   
I set my broad sole upon silver,
On the skin of the sky, on the moonlight,   
Stepping outward from earth onto water   
In quest of the miracle

This village of children believed   
That I could perform as I dived
For one who had sunk from my sight.   
I saw his cropped haircut go under.   
I leapt, and my steep body flashed   
Once, in the sun.

Dark drew all the light from my eyes.   
Like a man who explores his death
By the pull of his slow-moving shoulders,   
I hung head down in the cold,
Wide-eyed, contained, and alone
Among the weeds,

And my fingertips turned into stone   
From clutching immovable blackness.   
Time after time I leapt upward
Exploding in breath, and fell back   
From the change in the children’s faces   
At my defeat.

Beneath them I swam to the boathouse   
With only my life in my arms
To wait for the lake to shine back
At the risen moon with such power   
That my steps on the light of the ripples   
Might be sustained.

Beneath me is nothing but brightness   
Like the ghost of a snowfield in summer.   
As I move toward the center of the lake,   
Which is also the center of the moon,   
I am thinking of how I may be
The savior of one

Who has already died in my care.   
The dark trees fade from around me.   
The moon’s dust hovers together.   
I call softly out, and the child’s
Voice answers through blinding water.   
Patiently, slowly,

He rises, dilating to break
The surface of stone with his forehead.   
He is one I do not remember
Having ever seen in his life.
The ground I stand on is trembling   
Upon his smile.

I wash the black mud from my hands.   
On a light given off by the grave   
I kneel in the quick of the moon   
At the heart of a distant forest   
And hold in my arms a child   
Of water, water, water.

Source: James Dickey: The Selected Poems (Wesleyan University Press, 1998).

Thank you to everyone who joined us for this session!

For this session we read a poem “Storm Warning” by Robert Grant Burns, posted below.

Our prompt was: “Write about heeding, or ignoring, a warning.”

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 3rd at 6pm EDT, with more times listed on our Live Virtual Group Sessions.

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 "Storm Warning" by Robert Grant Burns

You said that when the peacocks took to the trees,
and all the birds, funch and jay and swallow,
whirred upon the same anxious note continually,
that is sign of storm coming.

And so the peacocks were
sitting in the branches,
each clumped in the fruit of its mad comprehension,
each in its innermost breast
thundering like great falling stones;
and all the birds whirred upon the same anxious note
continually.

That night, a storm came.

If only we, too, could be sure again,
in this forest of desire and foreboding,
sure, unerringly sure,
when to go home,
whom to shelter,
what to seek.

Source: Poetry (June 1969).

Thank you to everyone who joined us for this session!

For this session we took a close look at the painting “Bride of the wind” by Oskar Kokoschka, posted below.

Our prompt was: “Write about a moment of rest.”

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 March 31st at 12pm EDT, with more times listed on our Live Virtual Group Sessions.

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“Bride of the wind” by Oskar Kokoschka

Credit: Oskar Kokoschka. 1914

Thank you to everyone who joined us for this session!

For this session we took a close look at the paiting “Arcimboldo’s Vertumnus: A Portrait of Rudolf II” by Giuseppe Arcimboldo, posted below.

Our prompt was: “Write about a metamorphosis underway.”

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 March 27th at 6pm EDT, with more times listed on our Live Virtual Group Sessions.

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“Arcimboldo’s Vertumnus: A Portrait of Rudolf II” by Giuseppe Arcimboldo

© Skokloster Castle, Sweden. Photo credit: Samuel Uhrdin.

Thank you to everyone who joined us for this session!

For this session we read a poem “Lost” by David Wagoner, posted below.

Our prompt was: “Write about being found.”

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 March 24th at 12pm EDT, with more times listed on our Live Virtual Group Sessions.

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"Lost" by David Wagoner

Stand still. The trees ahead and bushes beside you
Are not lost. Wherever you are is called Here,
And you must treat it as a powerful stranger,
Must ask permission to know it and be known.
The forest breathes. Listen. It answers,
I have made this place around you.
If you leave it, you may come back again, saying Here.
No two trees are the same to Raven.
No two branches are the same to Wren.
If what a tree or a bush does is lost on you,
You are surely lost. Stand still. The forest knows
Where you are. You must let it find you.

Credit: poetryfoundation.org. David Wagoner. 

Thank you to everyone who joined us for this session!

For this session we read a poem “The Lost Land” by Eavan Boland, posted below. 

Our prompt was: “Write about something lost but never forgotten.”

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 March 17th at 12pm EDT, with more times listed on our Live Virtual Group Sessions.

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"The Lost Land" by Eavan Boland

I have two daughters.

They are all I ever wanted from the earth.

Or almost all.

I also wanted one piece of ground:

One city trapped by hills. One urban river.
An island in its element.

So I could say mine. My own.
And mean it.

Now they are grown up and far away

and memory itself
has become an emigrant,
wandering in a place
where love dissembles itself as landscape:

Where the hills
are the colours of a child's eyes,
where my children are distances, horizons:

At night,
on the edge of sleep,

I can see the shore of Dublin Bay.
Its rocky sweep and its granite pier.

Is this, I say
how they must have seen it,
backing out on the mailboat at twilight,

shadows falling
on everything they had to leave?
And would love forever?
And then

I imagine myself
at the landward rail of that boat
searching for the last sight of a hand.

I see myself
on the underworld side of that water,
the darkness coming in fast, saying
all the names I know for a lost land:

Ireland. Absence. Daughter.

Source: The Lost Land (W. W. Norton and Company Inc., 1998)

Thank you to everyone who joined us for this session!

For this session we read a poem “Let There Be Peace” by Lemn Sissay, posted below. 

Our prompt was: “ Write about My dreams of peace are.”

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 March 10th at 12pm EST, with more times listed on our Live Virtual Group Sessions.

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"Let There Be Peace" by Lemn Sissay

Let there be peace
So frowns fly away like albatross
And skeletons foxtrot from cupboards,
So war correspondants become travel show presenters
And magpies bring back lost property,
Children, engagement rings, broken things.

Let there be peace
So storms can go out to sea to be
Angry and return to me calm,
So the broken can rise up and dance in the hospitals.
Let the aged Ethiopian man in the grey block of flats
Peer through his window and see Addis before him,
So his thrilled outstretched arms become frames
For his dreams.

Let there be peace
Let tears evaporate to form clouds, cleanse themselves
And fall into reservoirs of drinking water.
Let harsh memories burst into fireworks that melt
In the dark pupils of a child’s eyes
And disappear like shoals of silver darting fish,
And let the waves reach the shore with a
Shhhhhhhhhhhhhhh Shhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh Shhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh

Credit: Lemn Sissay. communitypublishing.org

Thank you to everyone who joined us for this session!

For this session we read a poem “A Horse Named Never” by Jennifer Chang, posted below. 

Our prompt was: “Write about Never with bitterness.”

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 March 6th at 6pm EST, with more times listed on our Live Virtual Group Sessions.

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“A Horse Named Never” by Jennifer Chang

At the stables, each stall was labeled with a name.

Biscuit stood aloof — I faced, always, invariably, his clockwork tail.

Crab knew the salt lick too well.

Trapezoid mastered stillness: a midnight mare, she was sternest and tallest, her chest stretched against the edges of her stall.

I was not afraid of Never, the chestnut gelding, so rode his iron haunches as far as Panther Gap.

Never and I lived in Virginia then.

We could neither flee nor be kept.

Seldom did I reach the little mountain without him, the easy crests making valleys of indifferent grasses.

What was that low sound I heard, alone with Never?

A lone horse, a lodestar, a habit of fear.

We think of a horse less as the history of one man and his sorrows than as the history of a whole evil time.

Why I chose Never I’ll never know.

I fed him odd lettuce, abundant bitterness.

Who wore the bit and harness, who was the ready steed.

Never took the carrot, words by my own reckoning, an account of creeks and oystercatchers.

Our hoof-house rested at the foot of the mountain, on which rested another house more brazen than statuary.

Let it be known: I first mistook gelding for gilding.

I am the fool that has faith in Never.

Somewhere, a gold door burdened with apology refuses all mint from the yard.

Credit: Poetry (October 201). poetryfoundation.org