A Love [Haiku] to My Body

If you regularly visit my blog you know that body is something I often write about, thanks to a course I took in grad school: 'Feminist Theory - Writing the Body.'  Yesterday Rachel Held Evans shared 'A Love Letter to my Body [in Haiku]', her contribution to the SheLoves synchroblog, A Love Letter to My Body.  For my contribution I've written a haiku about the mole above my upper left lip that I share with my maternal great-grandmother, grandmother, and mother.  I've written a poem about it before, but I composed this haiku just for this occasion.  I hope you'll join in the love!

My mole, shared with three

generations of women,

I hope to pass on.

.the nature poems of Mary Oliver.

So the other day I wrote a post about 'writing the body' and how examples were revealing themselves to me everywhere I went, in whatever I was reading.  A similar thing has been happening since I discovered the nature poetry of Mary Oliver, an American writer born in Maple Heights, Ohio.  She's written countless collections of poetry and prose, (you can view many of them here) and I've decided she'll be the perfect companion for when my husband and I go camping this summer.  (We'll also be taking The Night Circus...my husband is really intrigued by this new novel).

I first discovered Mary Oliver thanks to a blog I follow called Kingdom Poets.  Then she showed up again in the daily post by The Writer's Almanac today on behalf of the first day of spring.  I'm already in love with her poems - lovely descriptions of nature, animals, and natural life.  I also love that you can find so many of her poems on the web, and lots of them are recorded.  

I really enjoyed this one (from Poetry Magazine), titled "Spring."  Signing off to continue reading and enjoying the lovely weather (even though we've leap-frogged spring and found ourselves in summer temperatures, humidity and all)!

Source: amazon.com via Jade on Pinterest

.Welcome to Holland.

One reason I love being a teacher is that I get to guide students in learning new things; but another is that my students help me learn new things too!  This quarter I was blessed with a really great class - the students worked well together, there was a great sense of community, and they encouraged each other in their individual projects.  Overall, it was a great learning experience for me after last quarter which was unpleasant to say the least.  But I can see how I did things differently at the beginning of the quarter and how this created a better, more communal learning environment (sometimes difficult to create, I've found, with freshmen undergrads).

One of my students wrote her 102 paper arguing that parents should not choose to put their disabled children up for adoption.  She was very close to this issue because she is a triplet sister to a brother with cerebral-palsy. When she first began this project I wasn't sure where it would take her.  I didn't know that there would be many people out there against her argument, but we both found out there were plenty of counter-arguments to address. I tend to be pretty open to any project student might propose.  I mean, I won't let them go down a dangerous path that might have them frustrated and weary by the end, but I don't set strict limits about what they should do.  I have found so far that when they work through whatever problems might arise with their topics it can help them problem-solve and learn.

This quarter I also gave them the option (and encouraged them) to conduct interviews with someone connected to their topic in some way.  This student chose her mother and through that interview discovered a poem that her mother read when she found out about her son.  This was a special experience for the student and her mother; she told me she started to cry when her mother described the poem.  She shared it with me and I'm sharing it with you today!

Here's a recording of the poem or you can read it below - -

Welcome to Holland by Emily Perl Kingsley (1987)
I am often asked to describe the experience of raising a child with a disability - to try to help people who have not shared that unique experience to understand it, to imagine how it would feel. It's like this......


When you're going to have a baby, it's like planning a fabulous vacation trip - to Italy. You buy a bunch of guide books and make your wonderful plans. The Coliseum. The Michelangelo David. The gondolas in Venice. You may learn some handy phrases in Italian. It's all very exciting.


After months of eager anticipation, the day finally arrives. You pack your bags and off you go. Several hours later, the plane lands. The stewardess comes in and says, "Welcome to Holland."


"Holland?!?" you say. "What do you mean Holland?? I signed up for Italy! I'm supposed to be in Italy. All my life I've dreamed of going to Italy."


But there's been a change in the flight plan. They've landed in Holland and there you must stay.


The important thing is that they haven't taken you to a horrible, disgusting, filthy place, full of pestilence, famine and disease. It's just a different place.


So you must go out and buy new guide books. And you must learn a whole new language. And you will meet a whole new group of people you would never have met.


It's just a different place. It's slower-paced than Italy, less flashy than Italy. But after you've been there for a while and you catch your breath, you look around.... and you begin to notice that Holland has windmills....and Holland has tulips. Holland even has Rembrandts.


But everyone you know is busy coming and going from Italy... and they're all bragging about what a wonderful time they had there. And for the rest of your life, you will say "Yes, that's where I was supposed to go. That's what I had planned."


And the pain of that will never, ever, ever, ever go away... because the loss of that dream is a very very significant loss.


But... if you spend your life mourning the fact that you didn't get to Italy, you may never be free to enjoy the very special, the very lovely things ... about Holland.

Cameos

I've started reading Object Lessons by Eavan Boland, a book Scott bought me for Christmas and I'm just now getting time to read.  In brilliant prose, she explores the woman poet of our time, sharing her own experiences as an Irish woman writing and finding her poetic voice.  I love Boland's poetry, but it has been enlightening to read her autobiographical essays as well.  One of her quotes really interested me and it became the inspiration for a new poem I thought I would share.  The quote reads:

Her name. Her emblem. There was a complexity for me remembering the cameo, and the more I thought about it, the more complex it became.  To inscribe a profile in the cold rock. To cut a human face into what had once flowed, fiery and devouring, past farms and villages and livestock.  To make a statement of something which was already a statement of random and unsparing destruction.  All these acts were very far from being simple.  They were ironic and self-conscious.  They employed artifice and irony.  They put the stamp of human remembrance on the material of natural destruction.

Cameos


Their cameos were pinned and fastened on dress collars,
clasped chains around their slender necks -
antique gold framing, fingernail-colored background,
a French tip resembling the form of a woman.
From the side, you could barely tell them apart
from their small daguerreotypes -
like a fashionable identification.

Nanny's was rounded and full,
and made in a time when it meant something
to be the real thing. So was Granny's.
Mom's was an oval-shaped reproduction,
a shade darker,
a weathered coral shell,
roughened by the sand and wind.
They were kept on top of dressers,
inside a bed of blue velvet,
cushioned and protected against the world -
hidden like the rare jewels they were.

When mom would loosen it from her neck
on Sundays after church,
I would sneak back to take a peak at the small figure -
her back straight, eyes forward, head gracefully balanced.
Turning sideways, catching a glimpse
of the little figure in the mirror,
I didn't see the same feminine profile -
only wild curls sprouting from a head slightly
cranned to the left.
I laid the cameo back in its small box,
wondering if I would ever have one of my own.

.electronic or print?.

Kindle, eBook, iPad, Nook. vs. the "hold-in-your-hand, honest page-turning" book.

This was a highly debated subject for my Lit. Theory class this past quarter.  Personally, I am in favor of print.  Believe me, I love my technology and hardly ever go a day without getting on my computer (I just about couldn't stand not having internet for a week when it went down at our apartment), but I just can't give up the rows and shelves (and piles in Scott's case) of books in our apartment.  I can't give up browsing the titles, touching the spines, and picking up the book to thumb through the crisp new pages at a book store (or used pages in the library).  I know many respectable people, even some literary people, argue that the new electronic books allow one to carry around thousands of books with them, but who is honestly going to need to carry them around all the time? Another argument is that printed texts cost so much more to produce; but is that what it's all really about, or should be about?? Perhaps this argument will never be resolved, and hopefully it will never need to, but I just hope that the end of printed books will never come in my time.

{here's a poem I wrote on the subject}
"Ode to a Book"

I lie reading a book before bed,
comforted by the soft light of my lamp,
and the slow rhythm of  turning the page.
The powdery feel of paper on my fingertips
as I lift the page up and over
to reveal more of Lily's concern with the bees
and a black madonna in a living room.


This is what reading is about, I sigh
thinking of someone else
more than likely tucked in bed just as I am
staring into a small bulbish screen.
Where is the lamp beside their bed?
Where is the comforting powdery turning of the page?
Where is the rollar coaster thrill of lifting it up and over?

Nothing.

Just a rectangular portal that can hold
thousands upon thousands, or so I've heard.
I imagine all of the books standing on their computerized shelf:
soldiers ready to serve their duty on the screen.
I lovingly take down the titles with their colorful spines;
thumbing over the pages with a faint smile
then raising it to my nose
taking in the smell of paper,
of years,
of wisdom.
My fellow reader views words backlit like flies hanging on a light.
Buzzing. Wurring.


These discomforting thoughts finally leave my mind
as I sink lower in my strawberry sheets,
and follow the small black ants skipping across my page
lifting them
up and over.
up and over.

{Another poem I've written recently after reading Walter Benjamin's "Unpacking My Library"}
"Ode to a Library Card"

"...one thing should be noted: the phenomenon of collecting [books] loses its meaning as it loses its personal owner. Even though public collections may be less objectionable socially and more useful academically than private collections, the objects get their due only in the latter." - Walter Benjamin - "Unpacking My Library"


A golden plastic ticket
giving me admission to
rows upon rows of voices whispering
under the pointed nose of the
middle-aged cardigan up front,
telling their stories,
sharing their histories,
bearing their flaws.


As a child we carried it with both hands
and reached it up to large eyes that looked through
magnifying glasses, we were granted two weeks with a dog riding in a taxi,
or an absurd breakfast of green eggs & ham.
Later it was carried in back pockets or wallets -
often cracked or broken,
caught in the wash or stolen.
We didn't care so much because it wasn't so cool to know much
so we'd stand around the magazines just to be safe.
Some of us decided the laminated treasure could save our lives
and we'd stash the bounty they rewarded us in book bags -
bring them out to hide behind,
comforted by the coffee stain on pg. 103
(evidence there was another reader out there,
an anonymous companion who shared our interest for
words and voices.)


No, we don't have rooms devoted to leather-bound first editions
and hand-painted children's books,
we can't take our guests into our studies
to wind through mahogoney bookcases
to sit in finely-cushioned chairs
and bask in the floating dust of bookcases.
Instead we borrow and share, and leave our own legacies on
crinkled pages worn from a day of beach-reading.
So Benjamin, you can keep unpacking your library, but as for me,
I'll take a public collection any day.

{photo from: http://jpsblog.org/wp-content/uploads/2009/12/ebook-vs-book.jpg}

.another experiment: why do you write?.

I just finished writing a paper in my Lit. Theory class that questioned and explored the authorial intent of a collection of Holocaust poems called, I Never Saw Another Butterfly.  The collection was written by young children imprisoned in the concentration camp of Terezin.  A particular quote by Walter Benjamin, in his article, "Task of the Translator," sparked my interest in discussing this topic.  His quote reads, "...in the appreciation of a work of art or an art form, consideration of the receiver never proves fruitful […] no poem is intended for the reader, no picture for the beholder, no symphony for the listener."  I found this quote extremely problematic, especially as a writer.  

In my paper, I discussed how, when reading the poems themselves and considering the circumstances in which they were created, a modern-day audience would think that the young children lived on the very idea that their poems would one day be read by others.  However, because we were not present during the act of their writing, nor did we get the chance to question their authorial intent, we as a present-day post-Holocaust audience, will never have the authority to answer this question. Frustrating, huh?


Indeed, after writing this paper, I still cannot wrap my head around what Benjamin's quote means for writers.  I can assume that, as a writer himself, he considered that his words would one day be read by a future audience (several of his articles and essays were published during his lifetime), and I understand that he is discussing the constraints that can come along with writing with a type of audience in mind; when we do not consider a particular audience, we can write free, unbridled meditations.  Perhaps Emily Dickinson is a prime example of this notion.  Although she gave her poems to others as gifts and her poems were read by others during her lifetime, she writes countless poems about the diminishing factor that publishing can cause for great art.  Once such poem is called "Fame:"

Fame is a fickle food

Upon a shifting plate

Whose table once a

Guest but not

The second time is set

Whose crumbs the crows inspect

And with ironic caw

Flap past it to the

Farmer’s corn

Men eat of it and die.
Returning to Benjamin's quote, he too greatly emphasizes the "unfruitful" art that can arise when one does consider an audience.  


It made me question why I, myself, write. I can say that having had this blog for a few months now, I write a little more deliberately, knowing that others will possibly stumble onto these words and read them.  However, I have found that in having a place where I can freely publish my thoughts and words, my poetry-writing has decreased tremendously in the last few months (this could also be due to the fact that I've not had too many bouts with insomnia lately, which is when I usually write poems).  This pattern could be unrelated to the presence of this blog, but it is certainly disheartening to myself as a poet.  Perhaps, in order to write (and create "fruitful art," as Benjamin writes) we must first step away from the need to publish and write merely to write.


Now I know in the case of the children writing during the Holocaust, their reasons for writing were very different from mine and many present-day writers.  All theories questioning the motivations behind writing during the Holocaust point to three basic reasons: writing as resistance, writing for survival, and writing to remember. These are all very probable reasons for why these young children were writing, along with the fact that their teacher, Friedl Dicker-Brandeis, gave them small assignments and art lessons in a small school-like setting of the camp.  It's hard for me to believe that these children were only writing in response to assignments, however, because they depict the events occurring around them with such urgency and detail.  But like I mentioned above, we can never know for sure to whom, or for whom, or with what intention they were writing.  


So, this is a question for my fellow writers, poets, and bloggers (another experiment if you will)...why do you write?  Do you consider any type of audience or do you have to step away from your knowledge that others will/can perhaps read your words?

Poetry Speaks

I'm really enjoying my grad classes this quarter, and after spending my fall semester in a high school experiencing the wonders of student teaching, I am appreciating my own learning experiences and being in an academic community again.  Sometimes, though, especially when I hear other teachers talking about their classrooms and the activities they are doing, I am eager to get in front of a classroom of my own.  I will soon find out whether I was accepted to be a TA in the English program, but until then I am building my "teaching file" of all the activities I want to do when I have my own English class.  

I would love to incorporate this new book, Poetry Speaks: who I am, featured today on NPR.org.  It includes modern poetry that appeals to teenage kids, while simultaneously presenting them with more "classical" poetry.  It even comes with a CD of poets reading their poems.  Seeing books like this really gets me excited about teaching, and I thought I would share it with my fellow teacher friends!  Have fun in the classroom and I hope to be joining you soon!

Having a "Flannery" moment

"Mail is very eventful to me..."


"I never mind writing anybody.  In fact it is about my only way of visiting people as I don't get around much and people seldom come to see us in the country." 
-Flannery O'Connor

Having recently moved from my hometown to a new area, I strongly yearn to become involved in a church; I have been praying about it even before we moved.  As a young girl, growing up in a very Christ-centered home, I attended a southern Baptist church every Sunday morning, evening, and Wednesday night.  I grew up reading Bible stories before bed and praying aloud with my family.  This continued for most of my childhood as I watched my parents perform their many activities in the church as strong leaders.  I grew up in a program called AWANA (Approved Workmen Are Not Ashamed), which was kind of like girl/boy scouts for churches where we all earned badges for memorizing Bible verses.  It made such a large impact on my life and I grew up loving church and being involved - my second family was at church.


Later, my church involvement was being a member of the choir and youth group, and I still felt very grounded and involved in church.  Now, being in a new place, trying to "find" another church, I can't help but yearn for Christian fellowship.  Scott and I pray together and read devotions, but I yearn for fellowship with other Christians as well.  I can often become discouraged when at school because I often find that many literary people tend to turn in the opposite direction, claiming that the Bible is just another piece of literature to be examined and that Jesus was just another fascinating character in a book.  While I do agree that the Bible can, and should be, examined as a fine piece of literature, it is an understatement even to say that it is much more than that.


Still, what does it mean to be "involved," and why is it so we often yearn for it?  I ask myself that now as I am hoping to find it - this sense of involvement.  Is it just the guilt some of us are instilled with as "good 'ol Baptists"? Or is it that as Christians we long to be around others who share our love for Christ?  Right now, beginning a new life in a new place, I am relying on my husband and phone calls from my mother for Christian fellowship, and frankly, those are some big shoes to fill for two people (though they are filling them quite beautifully).  


Sometimes, though, I feel like I could be like Flannery O'Connor, whose sole source of fellowship with others was through writing letters.  Scott gave me a collection of some of Flannery's letters, and though I haven't picked it up in some time, I enjoy reading it.  She is able to spread her beliefs and intelligently correspond with friends about her growth as a Christian and Southern writer.  Sometimes I think I would enjoy that kind of fellowship even more.  Just as I feel that my younger brother would have enjoyed living in another decade, I too would have loved to live in a time when letter-writing was the main form of communication (although I wouldn't give up my phone conversations with my mother for anything).  I do agree with Donald Hall (U.S. poet laureate a few years ago) who wrote: "I loathe the damned telephone; I prize the bundle of envelopes left each day in the outsized mailbox."  As a talented, award-winning poet, I'm sure he receives loads of mail and feels a sense of fellowship in corresponding in the written word.  Having a special place in my heart for the written word, I too would love to receive letters from friends discussing books, life, art, ect.  


The other day, I went to see Mary Doria Russell, New York Times Bestselling author of "Dreamers of the Day," and she made a funny remark.  She said she didn't need 3D friends anymore, she had the internet.  Everyone chuckled because she was obviously being sarcastic, being a child of the baby-boomer era, but I found it to be quite true.  We are so caught up in what's on TV, on the internet, what's new in stores, what's the newest "toy," that we very rarely discuss how we "feel" about things and how they affect us.  I read old letters from many years ago and people seemed to be able to express themselves so eloquently and their topics of discussion did not seem so superficial. How are people going to remember us?  I'm sure we will seem rather ADHD because we seem to only have time for small snippets of anything.  Going back to her quote, sometimes I feel like I don't even need 3D fellowship, just a written letter from a friend and fellow Christian that I can then respond to.


So what it all comes down to, is this: I am yearning for some fellowship with other Christians (besides my sweet husband and family).  My husband's advice: keep praying and be patient.  Ah, that patience word again.  Here is just another way for it to be tested I suppose...and isn't our weaknesses being tested as important in our walk with God as finding fellowship or somewhere we can be involved?  Perhaps I just found the reason for my struggle...


In the meantime, if you read these ramblings I am sending out into the void (to quote one of my favorite movies), and you too have a longing for some correspondence or fellowship, write me and we'll talk!

Discovering a New Epic

I had expected to read works like The Odyssey, Paradise Lost, and Beowolf in my Epic course this quarter.  What I did not expect was to learn about the more modern epics like Omeros, Loba, and The Waste Land.  Along with these "new" epics, I have stumbled onto Muriel Rukeyser's Book of the Dead.  It is an epic poem that illustrates the true story of the industrial disaster in West Virginia in 1927.  During the construction of the Hawk's Nest Tunnel in Gauley Bridge, West Virginia, workers were asked to mine silica, but were not given masks to use for protection.  "There are no definitive statistics, but several sources agree that resulting fatalities probably totalled approximately 700 of the 2000 workers." (Statemaster.com/encyclopedia)

The epic poem, Book of the Dead, is a heart-breakingly powerful work of poetry that details the catastrophic event through different voices and forms (even including the accounts of the trial and other mining data).  The epic begins with the beautiful images of West Virginia in THE ROAD and WEST VIRGINIA:


"These are roads to take when you think of your country.
Select the mountains, follow rivers back,
travel the passes.  Touch West Virginia...


The simple mountains, sheer, dark-graded pine
in the sudden weather, wet outbreak of spring,
crosscut the snow, wind at the hill's shoulder."


Reading on, the tone changes as we witness the personal accounts of the miners, their wives, doctors, and the committee assigned to the case.  This account is from a miner, Mearl Blankenship:


"He stood against the stove
facing the fire - 
Little warmth, no words,
loud machines.


Voted relief,
wished money mailed,
quietly under the crashing:


'I wake up choking, and my wife
'rolls me over on my left side;
'then I'm asleep in the dream I always see:
'the tunnel choked
'the dark wall coughing dust."
(from MEARL BLANKENSHIP)


Rukeyser captured the images of these West Virginians by traveling to Gauley Bridge to investigate the incident of the recurring deaths of the miners working on the tunnel.  The Book of the Dead is included in several of her collections, but was first published in 1938 in U.S. 1.  


An excerpt taken from her last poem in the collection:


"You standing over gorges, surveyors and planners,
you workers and hope of countries, first among powers;
you who give peace and bodily repose...


These are our strength, who strike against history.
These whose corrupt cells owe their new styles of weakness
              to our diseases;


these carrying light for safety on their foreheads
descended deeper for richer faults of ore,
               drilling their death.


These touching radium and the luminous poison,
carried their death in their lips and with their warning
               glow in their graves.


These weave and their eyes water and rust away,
these stand at wheels until their brains corrode,
              these farm and starve,


all these men cry their doom across the world,
meeting avoidable death, fight against madness,
                find every war...


Carry abroad the urgent need, the scene,
to photograph and to extend the voice,
             to speak this meaning.


Voices to speak to us directly. As we move.
As we enrich, growing in larger motion,
              this word, this power.


Down coasts of taken countries, mastery,
discovery at one hand, and at the other
               frontiers and forests,


fanatic cruel legend at our back and 
speeding ahead the red and open west,
               and this our region,


desire, field, beginning.  Name and road,
communication to these many men,
as epilogue, seeds of unending love."


*For the Raleigh County, West Virginia miners

Christmas all year round...

It has now been almost 80 days since Scott and I tied the knot and we are still recieving wedding gifts! Just this weekend, we recieved some items from Pampered Chef, four very cute mixing bowls, napkins, and a Willowbrook picture frame and figurine.  Getting married can mean presents for months to come and it can feel like Christmas all year round!  Another gift that was given to us this weekend from my dear great-aunt and her husband, was a tea set by Noble Excellence.  It came in a large hat box and contains little tea cups and plates, a saucer, and a darling little pot (which I have included below).  Each little cup displays a picture and a few lines from "Twas the Night Before Christmas." I'm so excited about displaying them for our first Christmas together as a married couple on our make-shift mantel (since we live in an apartment, we just bought a shelf that we are planning to use for Christmas decorations and for hanging our stockings). 

In other news, along with getting two more guitar referals this weekend (!!!), today I found out that my poem won second place in the John Fox Jr. Poetry Contest.  I will recieve $50 in the mail soon, along with a booklet including my poem and the other winners.  I always enter my poems or short stories in this yearly contest. It  reminds me of Jo March in Little Women recieving compensation for her short stories when I recieve my own check in the mail. 

SHOWER

Wide-hipped women come out of their houses;

come down from their hollers and make the

religious pilgrimage.

They’ll have wrapped up

pots

pans

towels

curtains

“Why when (Roger/Harold/Thomas/Nathan/John) and I were married, we didn’t have a thing to our name.”

silver spoons

knives

forks

“Another girl gettin’ married off – seems like just yesterday she come out of her momma screamin’, curly headed with fat cheeks.”

handpainted plates

hand-written recipes

“Why she won’t even cook – probably make him eat out every night.”

television sets

movie players

music players

Some of their men have gone on to Jesus and others are there in body only.

This is what they live for – a girl becoming a wife, a woman.

Marching in with their odd-shaped packages,

print Easter dresses worn even in November – coal dust clinging to their hemlines

candlesticks

picture frames

mixing bowls

They sit around together, little hens pecking each little detail.

They’ll be chewing on this one for a while, like the tobacco stained on their men’s teeth.

telephones

address books

They’ll make a note to call up a prayer chain when they get home,

Go back to their hollers, back to their houses and tell (Roger/Harold/Thomas/Nathan/John):

“Why they won’t be half as happy as we were.”

If he’s there, he’ll smile at her, peeling his eyes away from the television set

to say, “That’s nice, dear.”

If he’s not, she’ll take his picture down from the shelf

and he’ll smile at her, uniformed and forever young.

Either way, she’ll walk in the kitchen with a handkerchief,

wiping a tear from her cheek.

Billy Collins

One of my favorite poets is Billy Collins.  He often writes about the art of writing poetry.  Here is one called "The Poems of Others," that comes from his new book of poems, Ballistics:


The Poems of Others


Is there no end to it
the way they keep popping up in magazines
then congregate in the drafty orphanage of a book?


You would think the elm would speak up,
but like the dawn it only inspires - then more of them
   appear.
Not even the government can put a stop to it.


Just this morning, one approached me like a possum,
snout twitching, impossible to ignore.
Another looked out of the water at me like an otter.


How can anyone dismiss them
when they dangle from the eaves of houses
and throw themselves in our paths?


Perhaps I am being harsh, even ridiculous.
It could have been the day at the zoo
that put me this way - all the children by the cages - 


as if only my poems had the right to exist
and people would come down from the hills
in the evening to view them in rooms of white marble.


So I will take the advice of the mentors
and put this in a drawer for a week
maybe even a year or two and then have a calmer
   look at it - 


but for now I am going to take a walk
through this nearly silent neighborhood
that it my winter resting place, my hibernaculum,


and get my mind off the poems of others
even as they peer down from the trees
or bark at my passing in the guise of local dogs.


And here is a poem that I wrote about poetry and writing, called "Writing Circles:"

I say that everything has been thought of

Every metaphor and simile has been compared

And every phrase of mere brilliance has been placed within its perfect syntax

I imagine the last poet glancing at the sky and seeing life’s melody play before him in the clouds, turning to his typewriter and painting it for others to see and hear

The lonely woman in the park who sees the green grass before her and imagines the small world that plays out beneath her bare feet, writing the small screenplay in her leather-bound notebook.

And the clever college graduate who pulls out his Blackberry to discover that time is a cage that traps us all in its sad game of catch and we have no base to wait on and think for one moment, sending along his message that will be read once and tossed into a recycle bin

The poet’s typewritten words are later found within the messages of a recycled newspaper advertisement about a city whose sky is polluted by paper factory smoke

The lonely woman’s ink seeps through the ground to the ants below, who play out the script she wrote for them and carry away the small pieces of paper one word at a time

And the clever college graduate’s message is lost within the galaxy of cyberspace where moons and planets spin around a black hole and never quite find their way to the light of the sun

And I lay down my pencil, thankful for the revolving life we live and the way things must come full circle…