I'm hoping to create a daily prompt again this month.
Here's my attempt at a topsy-turvy two-stanza poem. As happens during these months of a poem-a-day, this one's pretty unfinished and unrevised, but the point is to loosen up and not get caught in my desire for perfection:
You know how it is,
how you amble down that dusty road,
scramble over rocks and stones,
and it becomes a game to name
the turnings on the winding way?
You know, like the story of the children
stumbling through the woods
who laid a trail of breadcrumbs
so they could find their way home.
You could say
it's all a part of the part you play,
the scene you've been assigned,
the way the play's designed--
one act follows another, but what if
the old woman was saving the brother,
cold as he was from walking in the wood,
and what if the sister got the story twisted,
or the townspeople insisted
on telling the story their way?
Who's to say?
Gratitude List:
1. A work day at school. It's nice to have a day when the students aren't around, just to catch up and catch my breath.
2. A thousand shades of green
3. Flamingos and ostriches. They really do seem sort of impossible, which makes them doubly charming
4. Grounding. Every day, I do a grounding meditation. Since my trip to Tanzania, I can feel my roots spread out so far, so far.
5. The Springtime dawn bird chorus has been filling out a little more each day.
May we walk in Beauty!
Words for the Day of the Holy Fool:
"Let's be April fools in the Shakespearean sense of fools. Time to be insightful and speak truth to power." —Jarod Anderson, The Cryptonaturalist
"If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry. " —Emily Dickinson
"The fullness of joy is to behold God in everything." —Julian of Norwich
"Loneliness does not come from having no people about one, but from being unable to communicate the things that seem important to oneself, or from holding certain views which others find inadmissible." —Carl Jung
"Poems are maps to the place where you already are." —Jane Hirshfield
"Be still, and the world is bound to turn herself inside out to entertain you. Everywhere you look, joyful noise is clanging to drown out quiet desperation. The choice is to draw the blinds and shut it all out, or believe." —Barbara Kingsolver, High Tide in Tucson
"When you do not know you need mercy and forgiveness yourself, you invariably become stingy in sharing it with others. So make sure you are always waiting with hands widely cupped under the waterfall of mercy." —Richard Rohr
"All four gospels insist that when all the other disciples are fleeing, Mary Magdalene does not run. She stands firm. She does not betray or lie about her commitment to Jesus—she witnesses. Hers is clearly a demonstration of either the deepest human love or the highest spiritual understanding of what Jesus was teaching—perhaps both. But why—one wonders–do Holy Week liturgies tell and re-tell the story of Peter's threefold denial of Jesus, while the steady and unwavering witness of Magdalene is passed over—not even noticed? How would our understanding of the paschal story change if instead of reflecting upon Jesus dying alone and rejected if we were to reinforce the fact that one person stood by him and did not leave? For this story of Mary Magdalene is as firmly stated in scripture as the denial story. How would this change the emotional timbre of the day? How would it affect our feeling of ourselves? How would it reflect upon how we have viewed, and still view, women in the church? About the nature of redemptive love?" —Cynthia Bourgeault, Episcopal Priest
"When I feel this fog rolling in on me, I light fires of affection in the hearts of others. I tell them in tangible ways how the life they live makes me live mine differently, how precious and important they are to the rest of us. That fire then becomes like a beacon which burns through the grey and which I can sail towards." –Toko-pa Turner
It's good to leave each day behind,
like flowing water, free of sadness.
Yesterday is gone and its tale told.
Today new seeds are growing.
—Rumi
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