Good morning, good morning. It’s 5am and there are candles and it’s dark and snowing and I have the old loud heater at my feet and quiet music and hot tea. This morning I feel grateful even though the whole world feels like it’s falling apart.
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What we were looking for
“Someday we will find what we are looking for – or maybe we won’t. Maybe we will find something much greater than that.”
(No one seems to know who wrote that phrase — have you seen it attributed to anyone?)
Good morning, good morning. My alarm went off at 4am and now it’s quarter to 5 and I am just settling in. The candles are flickering and I have my tea and I’m pushing in. What I want is to just read for awhile and then go back to sleep. I haven’t looked at Twitter in more than a week now; maybe just a moment when Russia invaded Ukraine, to find the feed of an Iranian-Georgian woman I follow, just to see her thoughts, but she was focused closer to home.
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a different kind of fed
Lisbon street art
(CN: Social media frustrations and description of a graphic image of violence near the end of the post)
Social media has colonized what was once a sacred space occupied by emptiness: the space reserved for thought and creativity. – Mahershala Ali
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can we have delight even when we’re so rightfully angry?
The puppy doesn’t care how pretty the sunrise is – she has her ball
CN: talk about rage and reasons to be enraged and also some not-rageful sex talk toward the end
Good morning, good morning. The puppy got me up, accidentally, at 2:30 or so, and I haven’t been able to fall back to sleep since — so we came out through the rain (the puppy walking close to me to stay under the umbrella) to the little house and have the candles lit and she is comfortable tucked in her chair under one of the blankets that I bought at Ikea when I was furnishing the office I had in Oakland for a little while and the tea kettle is on and the space heater is churning at my feet and we have an astonishingly perfect morning place. The ocean is so loud I could hear it from the bed, which is rare — it’s been warm the last couple of days, but windy, and there’s clearly a storm coming or influencing us from somewhere.
small successes and the chance to keep going
There’s a way not to be broken that takes brokenness to find it. – Naomi Shihab Nye Good morning, good morning. It’s warm outside, warmer than it ought to be in February, but I can’t complain about it because the cold has been a struggle the last week or so. It’s true that February is always when the winter blues start to hover, or just the frustration, the weariness — do I really have to put all of these clothes on just to take the dog on a walk again today? But the moon is a full brightness behind the clouds and the light changed sometime earlier this month, so I’ve begun to imagine what spring might feel like, have begun to think about the garden, can start to let myself imagine what the yard will look like when it’s not just covered with snow and ice and mud.
•§•
In just a couple of weeks, I’m going to turn 50. This fact has been filling me with dread for a few years. But not for the reasons I, as a woman, am supposed to dread aging.
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WriOursWhoMo – April Poems: Rae Armantrout’s “Scumble”
Scumble
Rae Armantrout
What if I were turned on by seemingly innocent words such as
“scumble,” “pinky,”
or “extrapolate?”
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Tagged morning write, naming, poetry, WriOursWhoMo, writing into possibility
WriOursWhoMo – April Poems: “Girl” and “[asking]”
Two poems for this Monday:
Girl
by Eve Alexandra
Be careful if you take this flower into your house. The
peony has a thousand lips. It is pink and white like the lady’s
skirt and smells sharp and sweet as cinnamon. There are a
thousand ants living inside but you will only see one or two at
a time. I am like that down there–pink and busy inside. The
dark is a bolt of cloth, crushed and blue, and I unfurl against it.
If you lie down on the floor of the closet the hems of silk will
lick you. My own gown is thin as the skin of dried grass so I
can see the ants dancing down there. The night has big paws.
I imagine the wool of the bears, the cloth of monkeys. the night
smells like vetiver and cedar. His mouth is cool with mint and
warm with rum, and I am not afraid as he rubs his wool against
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Tagged poetry, spring, trauma aftermath, WriOursWhoMo, writing prompts
WriOursWhoMo – April Poems: Mary Oliver’s “Starlings in Winter”
Starlings in Winter
Mary Oliver
Chunky and noisy,
but with stars in their black feathers,
they spring from the telephone wire
and instantly
they are acrobats
in the freezing wind.
And now, in the theater of air,
they swing over buildings,
dipping and rising;
they float like one stippled star
that opens,
becomes for a moment fragmented,
then closes again;
and you watch
and you try
but you simply can’t imagine
how they do it
with no articulated instruction, no pause,
only the silent confirmation
that they are this notable thing,
this wheel of many parts, that can rise and spin
over and over again,
full of gorgeous life.
Ah, world, what lessons you prepare for us,
even in the leafless winter,
even in the ashy city.
I am thinking now
of grief, and of getting past it;
I feel my boots
trying to leave the ground,
I feel my heart
pumping hard, I want
to think again of dangerous and noble things.
I want to be light and frolicsome.
I want to be improbable beautiful and afraid of nothing,
as though I had wings.
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Tagged birds, long work of healing, Mary Oliver, poetry, WriOursWhoMo, writing prompts
WriOursWhoMo – April Poems: Dorianne Laux’s “Antilamentation”
writingAntilamentation
Dorianne Laux
Regret nothing. Not the cruel novels you read
to the end just to find out who killed the cook.
Not the insipid movies that made you cry in the dark,
in spite of your intelligence, your sophistication.
Not the lover you left quivering in a hotel parking lot,
the one you beat to the punchline, the door, or the one
who left you in your red dress and shoes, the ones
that crimped your toes, don’t regret those.
Not the nights you called god names and cursed
your mother, sunk like a dog in the livingroom couch,
chewing your nails and crushed by loneliness.
You were meant to inhale those smoky nights
over a bottle of flat beer, to sweep stuck onion rings
across the dirty restaurant floor, to wear the frayed
coat with its loose buttons, its pockets full of struck matches.
You’ve walked those streets a thousand times and still
you end up here. Regret none of it, not one
of the wasted days you wanted to know nothing,
when the lights from the carnival rides
were the only stars you believed in, loving them
for their uselessness, not wanting to be saved.
You’ve traveled this far on the back of every mistake,
ridden in dark-eyed and morose but calm as a house
after the TV set has been pitched out the upstairs
window. Harmless as a broken ax. Emptied
of expectation. Relax. Don’t bother remembering
any of it. Let’s stop here, under the lit sign
on the corner, and watch all the people walk by.
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Tagged freewriting, morning write, poetry, WriOursWhoMo, writing prompts
WriOursWhoMo – April Poems: Marci Calabretta Cancio-Bello’s “In the Animal Garden of My Body”
In the Animal Garden of My Body
Marci Calabretta Cancio-Bello
Ask me again how the story should go. How much the underbelly of my garden held to bring forth spring, how much hunger I had to devour to get the sweetness I wanted from it. Did this devouring frighten you? I frightened myself in how much I promised to tell you if you asked me again about the water the water the water. What errors I made calculating the downward trajectory of memory rattling loose in the inhale, sharp in the shoulder blades exhaling like wings or whales or swizzles of light. Ask me again what I offered as a sacrifice to the rooster crowing his betrayal of morning. Forgiveness, what a sharp blade I press my body hard against.
~~ ~~ ~~ ~~ ~~
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Tagged freewriting, poetry, trauma aftermath, WriOursWhoMo, writing prompts