Today's prompt at Brewer's blog is to write a Problem Poem. I was reading Idra Novey's poem "That's How Far I'd Drive for It" in the November Poetry journal today during library time, in which she does this short series of three lines near the end of this three-page poem in which she creates a beautiful negation full of relief after bad things didn't happen. Crises occurred, but the worst-case scenarios didn't happen. So in my poem today, I am taking the problems and subjecting them to Novey's negation. (The pond, of course, is metaphor for a different kind of near-drowning.)
Negation
But I didn't stay at the bottom of that pond.
They didn't cross the threshold at the Gates of Death.
The sky didn't open up and swallow us.
The world was not drowned in the great silence.
We didn't get consigned to hell.
Someone started singing,
the vultures came, and were fed,
the work got done, the children tended,
the bills got paid, the truth got said,
the dream became the dreamer,
the morning star continued shining yet more brightly in the dawn.
Gratitude List:
1. Poetry journal. About a year ago, one of the guest editors suggested reading the journal with a pencil or pen, and marking it up, underlining and responding to the poets. I do that regularly now, and I think I have become an even more careful reader, and I've also found such intense inspiration for my own writing as I pause and consider my responses to the poems. I think it helps me learn better how to unpack literature with my students, too.
2. Friday morning breakfast with colleagues.
3. That painting of the ivory-billed woodpecker that my dad made for me.
4. Dreams coming true.
5. I stopped to put some of my culled books in a little free library today, and picked up a copy of Natasha Trethaway's Monument! What a treasure!
May we walk in Beauty!
"Awake, my dear. Be kind to your sleeping heart. Take it out into the vast fields of light and let it breathe." —Hafiz
"Mercy is the willingness to enter into the chaos of another." —James Keenan
"The heavens are sweeping us along in a cyclone of stars." —Teilhard de Chardin
"Sometimes I hear it talking. The light of the sunflower was one language, but there are others more audible. Once, in the redwood forest, I heard a beat, something like a drum or heart coming from. the ground and trees and wind. That underground current stirred a kind of knowing inside me, a kinship and longing, a dream barely remembered that disappeared back to the body. Another time, there was the booming voice of an ocean storm thundering from far out at sea, telling about what lived in the distance, about the rough water that would arrive, wave after wave revealing the disturbance at center.
Tonight I walk. I am watching the sky. I think of the people who came before me and how they knew the placement of stars in the sky, watched the moving sun long and hard enough to witness how a certain angle of light touched a stone only once a year. Without written records, they knew the gods of every night, the small, fine details of the world around them and of immensity above them.
Walking, I can almost hear the redwoods beating. And the oceans are above me here, rolling clouds, heavy and dark, considering snow. On the dry, red road, I pass the place of the sunflower, that dark and secret location where creation took place. I wonder if it will return this summer, if it will multiply and move up to the other stand of flowers in a territorial struggle.
It's winter and there is smoke from the fires. The square, lighted windows of houses are fogging over. It is a world of elemental attention, of all things working together, listening to what speaks in the blood. Whichever road I follow, I walk in the land of many gods, and they love and eat one another. Walking, I am listening to a deeper way. Suddenly all my ancestors are behind me. Be still, they say. Watch and listen. You are the result of the love of thousands." —Linda Hogan
Expose yourself to your deepest fear. After that, you are free." —Jim Morrison
Joseph Campbell: "The cave you fear to enter holds the treasure that you seek."
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