Thank you to everyone who joined us for this session!

For this session we took a close look at a clip from the movie “The Hours [2002] – Flowers, what a beautiful morning“ and read the poem “Instructions on Not Giving Up” by Ada Limón, posted below.

Our prompt was: “An obscene display of color.”

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 January 14th at 6pm EST, with more times listed on our Live Virtual Group Sessions.

The Hours [2002] – Flowers, what a beautiful morning

Instructions on Not Giving Up

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 for this session!

For this session we took a close look at the painting“High Noon” by Daniela García Hamilton, posted below.

Our prompt was: “Write about a table in the wilderness.”

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

“High Noon” by Daniela García Hamilton

Credit: Daniela García Hamilton

Thank you to everyone who joined us for this session!

For this session we read an excerpt from “This is Happiness” by Niall Williams, posted below.

Our prompt was: “Write about when the rain stopped.”

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 December 5th at 12pm EST, with more times listed on our Live Virtual Group Sessions.

This is Happiness by Niall Williams

Nobody in Faha could remember when it started. Rain there on the western seaboard was a condition of living. It came straight-down and sideways, frontwards, backwards and any other wards God could think of. It came in sweeps, in waves, sometimes in veils. It came dressed as drizzle, as mizzle, as mist, as showers, frequent and widespread, as a wet fog, as a damp day, a drop, a dreeping, and an out-and-out downpour. It came the fine day, the bright day, and the day promised dry. It came at any time of the day and night, and in all seasons, regardless of calendar and forecast, until in Faha your clothes were rain and your skin was rain and your house was rain with a fireplace. It came off the grey vastness of an Atlantic that threw itself against the land like a lover once spurned and resolved not to be so again. It came accompanied by seagulls and smells of salt and seaweed. It came with cold air and curtained light. It came like a judgement, or, in benign version, like a blessing God had forgotten he had left on. It came for a handkerchief of blue sky, came on westerlies, sometimes - why not? - on easterlies, came in clouds that broke their backs on the mountains in Kerry and fell into Clare, making mud the ground and blind the air. It came disguised as hail, as sleet, but never as snow. It came softly sometimes, tenderly sometimes, its spears turned to kisses, in rain that pretended it was not rain, that had come down to be closer to the fields whose green it loved and fostered, until it drowned them. All of which, to attest to the one truth: in Faha, it rained.

Credit: Niall Williams

Thank you to everyone who joined us for this session!

For this session we read the poem “Why Write Love Poetry in a Burning World ” by Katie Farris, posted below.

Our prompt was: “Write about a door you cannot close.”

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

"Why Write Love Poetry in a Burning World " by Katie Farris

To train myself to find, in the midst of hell
what isn't hell.

The body, bald, cancerous, but still
beautiful enough to
imagine living the body
washing the body
replacing a loose front
porch step the body chewing
what it takes to keep a body
going—

This scene has a tune
a language I can read a door
I cannot close I stand
within its wedge
a shield.

Why write love poetry in a burning world?
To train myself, in the midst of a burning world
to offer poems of love to a burning world.

Copyright © 2022 Katie Farris All rights reserved

Thank you to everyone who joined us for this session!

For this session we read a poem “I Am Vertical” by Sylvia Plath, posted below.

Our prompt was: “Write about an open conversation with the sky.”

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 29th at 6pm EDT, with more times listed on our Live Virtual Group Sessions.

“I Am Vertical” by Sylvia Plath

But I would rather be horizontal.
I am not a tree with my root in the soil
Sucking up minerals and motherly love
So that each March I may gleam into leaf,
Nor am I the beauty of a garden bed
Attracting my share of Ahs and spectacularly painted,
Unknowing I must soon unpetal.
Compared with me, a tree is immortal
And a flower-head not tall, but more startling,
And I want the one’s longevity and the other’s daring.

Tonight, in the infinitesimal light of the stars,
The trees and flowers have been strewing their cool odors.
I walk among them, but none of them are noticing.
Sometimes I think that when I am sleeping
I must most perfectly resemble them—
Thoughts gone dim.
It is more natural to me, lying down.
Then the sky and I are in open conversation,
And I shall be useful when I lie down finally:
The the trees may touch me for once, and the flowers have time for me.

Credit: Sylvia Plath

Thank you to everyone who joined us for this session!

For this session we read an excerpt from “The Antidote ” by Karen Russell, posted below.

Our prompt was: “Tell about a song that has not been lost.”

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

“The Antidote ” by Karen Russell pg.392

Many songs have been lost. But not all songs have been lost.
I breathed in a lungful of dust at the top of the ladder, sinking my fingers into the wet soil. Job ends his
interrogation of God in a great quiet. When I surfaced from my whirlwind, I heard a lot of noisy, irreverent
chirping. Meadowlarks darted around the ruins of my house, skimming the tires of the truck the twister had
flipped onto its back like some colossal beetle. Goldfinches were swooping in and out of the roofless barn
like indecisive stars. Grassland songbirds chorus every morning on the prairie, rain or shine, drought or
flood. Singing at the tops of their tiny lungs and stitching the world together, waking everyone to the work
ahead. But rarely do I pay attention. In the Book of Job, what God reveals inside the whirlwind cannot
be written down. The omission made more sense to me now, listening to birdsong. Already, God has
translated the answer into everything living. It was Job’s ears that needed tuning. The whirlwind gave Job
a powerful instruction, and so did the great quiet it left in its wake. The silence of God is not so silent after
all. It is teaching me how to listen.

Credit: Karen Russell

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
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