Thank you to everyone who joined us for this session!

For this session we read a poem “In Praise of Mystery: A Poem for Europa” by Ada Limón, posted below.

Our prompt was: “Write about a small invisible world.”

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 Wednesday October 8th at 12pm EDT, with more times listed on our Live Virtual Group Sessions.

In Praise of Mystery: A Poem for Europa by Ada Limón

Arching under the night sky inky
with black expansiveness, we point
to the planets we know, we

pin quick wishes on stars. From earth,
we read the sky as if it is an unerring book
of the universe, expert and evident.

Still, there are mysteries below our sky:
the whale song, the songbird singing
its call in the bough of a wind-shaken tree.

We are creatures of constant awe,
curious at beauty, at leaf and blossom,
at grief and pleasure, sun and shadow.

And it is not darkness that unites us,
not the cold distance of space, but
the offering of water, each drop of rain,

each rivulet, each pulse, each vein.
O second moon, we, too, are made
of water, of vast and beckoning seas.

We, too, are made of wonders, of great
and ordinary loves, of small invisible worlds,
of a need to call out through the dark.

“In Praise of Mystery” by Ada Limón was released at the Library of Congress on June 1, 2023, in celebration of the poem’s engraving on NASA’s Europa Clipper, scheduled to launch in October of 2024. Copyright Ada Limón, 2023. All rights reserved. The reproduction of this poem may in no way be used for financial gain.

Thank you to everyone who joined us for this session!

For this session we read a poem “Classifieds” by Wislawa Szymborska, posted below.

Our prompt was: “Write your own classified.”

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

Classifieds by Wislawa Szymborska

WHOEVER'S found out what location
compassion (heart's imagination)
can be contacted at these days,
is herewith urged to name the place;
and sing about it in full voice,
and dance like crazy and rejoice
beneath the frail birch that appears
to be upon the verge of tears.

I TEACH silence
in all languages
through intensive examination of:
the starry sky,
the Sinanthropus' jaws,
a grasshopper's hop,
an infant's fingernails,
plankton,
a snowflake.

I RESTORE lost love.
Act now! Special offer!
You lie on last year's grass
bathed in sunlight to the chin
while winds of summers past
caress your hair and seem
to lead you in a dance.
For further details, write: "Dream."

WANTED: someone to mourn
the elderly who die
alone in old folks' homes.
Applicants, don't send forms
or birth certificates.
All papers will be torn,
no receipts will be issued
at this or later dates.

FOR PROMISES made by my spouse,
who's tricked so many with his sweet
colors and fragrances and sounds --
dogs barking, guitars in the streets --
into believing that they still
might conquer loneliness and fright,
I cannot be responsible.
Mr. Day's widow, Mrs. Night.

Credit: Wislawa Szymborska
English version by Clare Cavanagh and Stanislaw Baranczak
Original Language Polish
poetry-chaikhana.com

Thank you to everyone who joined us for this session!

For this session we read a poem “What Sucks About the Afterlife” by Andrea Gibson, posted below.

Our prompt was: “Write about the mistake factory.”

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 note that following our session on Monday, August 4th, we will be taking a summer break. Stay tuned for updates on our return in September! **

“What Sucks About the Afterlife” by Andrea Gibson

On Earth, everyone loved butterflies,
but I trusted the caterpillars more.
I trusted the ones who knew 

they were not done growing.
On Earth, I was a work in progress,
was comforted in knowing 

that I had a million mistakes still in me
to learn from. I changed my mind
more often than I changed my socks, 

and whenever I was criticized
for mismatched thoughts, I’d say,
who wants to be today 

who they were yesterday?
Becoming was how I prayed.
But here—I am past the finish line: 

I have a heart of gold,
and I never have to dig for it.
I couldn’t do anything wrong if I tried,
and trust me, I try, but 

I get hot-headed, and my rage
toasts the marshmallow on an angel’s
celestial s’mores. I lose my temper and find it
in the halo lost-and found box. 

Lies won’t let me tell them.
they handed me a sticker
that said My Name Is and I wrote
Everyone by accident. I can’t remember 

what selfishness is. Yesterday I said
something angry about an ex, and a quarter
of my tastebuds jumped off my tongue.
I’ve known nothing 

of bitterness since.
Right before I died, I thought,
In the afterlife, I’ll apply for a job
at a mistake factory. They’ll be awed 

by my resume. If anything, I’m overqualified.
But there’s no place where they make
mistakes here. Everyone is flawless.
Everyone’s blunders are photoshopped 

right off their lives before
they even happen. Is this heaven
or hell? I can’t tell. I looked
that famous carpenter up 

in the phone book, but his number
wasn’t listed, and I need to ask him
where to find the wood to build
some missteps. I’m not about to spend 

eternity burning in the lie that holy
and perfect are the same thing.
Do you understand? 

A promised land
is not a promised land
if I can’t keep learning

Credit:Andrea Gibson

Thank you to everyone who joined us for this session!

For this session we took a close look at the piece “Le Repos” by Marc Chagall, posted below.

Our prompt was: “Write about something carried that is visible or invisible.”

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 August 4th at 6pm EDT, with more times listed on our Live Virtual Group Sessions.

Le Repos by Marc Chagall

Credit: Marc Chagall

Thank you to everyone who joined us for this session!

For this session we read a poem “GOD” by Campbell McGrath, posted below.

Our prompt was: “The body prefers...”

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 August 1st at 12pm EDT, with more times listed on our Live Virtual Group Sessions.

GOD by Campbell McGrath

GOD
It makes sense notionally, a painless hypothesis
for our predicament, crayoned face to bridge
the gulf between grace and lightning storm.
But why should God be imagined as human—heavens,
dogs are nobler creatures, to say nothing of whales
or oak trees—and why as a man? Why should God
be gendered any more than potassium and gravity?
If a coconut falls on your head, you don't question its
sexuality. You curse, flail, you might even die,
poor donkey of the body tapping out, farewell.
Death doesn't scare the body because all the body wants
is to lie on the couch with a golf tournament on TV
but the mind is drip, drip, drip, drip, relentless.
It wants God to be more than a notion, it wants God
to be real so it can escape the hairy carcass
and rise—eternity seems always to be an ascension—
the mind wants to climb that ladder while the body 
prefers to bask in a confetti of chatter,
the mind wants to study the stars from the roof
and imagine an afterlife it understands 
deep down, in its python coils, to be nothing 
but a metaphor, a hunger for reassurance, a telescope
resolving the night into a zodiac of consolation.

Credit: Campbell McGrath
The New Yorker. June 30, 2025

Thank you to everyone who joined us for this session!

For this session we read a poem “Try to Praise the Mutilated World” by Adam Zagajewski, posted below.

Our prompt was: “Write about a world you imagine.”

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 July 21st at 12pm EDT, with more times listed on our Live Virtual Group Sessions.

 Try to Praise the Mutilated World by Adam Zagajewski

Try to praise the mutilated world.
Remember June's long days,
and wild strawberries, drops of rosé wine.
The nettles that methodically overgrow
the abandoned homesteads of exiles.
You must praise the mutilated world.
You watched the stylish yachts and ships;
one of them had a long trip ahead of it,
while salty oblivion awaited others.
You've seen the refugees going nowhere,
you've heard the executioners sing joyfully.
You should praise the mutilated world.
Remember the moments when we were together
in a white room and the curtain fluttered.
Return in thought to the concert where music flared.
You gathered acorns in the park in autumn
and leaves eddied over the earth's scars.
Praise the mutilated world
and the gray feather a thrush lost,
and the gentle light that strays and vanishes
and returns.

Copyright Credit: Adam Zagajewski, "Try to Praise the Mutilated World" from Without End: New and Selected Poems. Copyright © 2002 by Adam Zagajewski. Used by permission of Farrar, Straus & Giroux, LLC,  http://us.macmillan.com/fsg. All rights reserved.

Thank you to everyone who joined us for this session!

For this session we read a poem “An Optimism” by Cameron Awkward-Rich, posted below.

Our prompt was: “Write about a time a door opened.”

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 July 18th at 12pm EDT, with more times listed on our Live Virtual Group Sessions.

An Optimism by Cameron Awkward-Rich

It is morning. Remember that.
It is morning and the house is quiet,
so quiet that I can, for the moment, set myself
to wandering. I can sit patient at the door.
I can beg and bang to be let in. I am
turning this way and that. I am circling
the hole in the world of my imagination.
Let me in. I am saying the words, predictable
as any key—when I was a child,
when my mother, when the swarm of bees,
when I spent my days in mud among
the worms, rushing down the hill, our flooding
yard, when Hannah’s brother, her mother,
when I was too unclean, too wild a thing,
when I was barred from, when I sat alone
in the snow behind her house, pristine,
when, briefly, J and I were, when we
flew darkly down the green suburban
street, when he loved me, or something
in me and I loved the wind between us,
our bloody knees, when I think back, I am
nearly always otherwise alone, though
I never was alone, child of the salamanders,
child of the morning snow, the shamefaced
leaves. All my life, certainly for as long
as I’ve known I had a life, I was
like the sparrow right now outside
my window, flying headfirst, incessantly,
into what must seem, to her, like sky.
All around me people moved and laughed
and seemed, from where I fell,
to understand some silent thing,
some secret word that made itself
no home in me. Aggrieved, the world
of other people. I let it go.

Source: Poetry (June 2025)

Thank you to everyone who joined us for this session!

For this session we took a close look at the painting “Woman in Blue” by Chaim Soutine, posted below.

Our prompt was: “Write about something untold.”

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 July 11th at 12pm EDT, with more times listed on our Live Virtual Group Sessions.

Woman in Blue by Chaim Soutine

Credit: Chaim Soutine. barnesfoundation.org