Tag: poetry

process

Working on specific projects — this Sunday’s service at my church, the writing prompt for next week’s meeting of my new writing group at FUUSN, and the agenda for the writing class I’ll be facilitating at HILR in October. Both the writing groups are called Letters—In the Company of Writers.

I need to say that this was not the way I intended to spend my summer—I had “simplified” my usual routine and intended to be editing the “big” memoir all summer. I had blocked out days that were not going to be for anything other than writing/editing and had given up any wish for leaving town for any length of time.  

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Posted on by Suzanne Buchko 1

sweet impossible blossom

“There are days we live
as if death were nowhere
in the background; from joy
to joy to joy, from wing to wing,
from blossom to blossom to
impossible blossom, to sweet impossible blossom.”

Parker Palmer posted these lines From Blossoms, by Li-Young Lee.

The words break me open.  I could almost feel the crack and see the light shining through. I have lived for so so long as if death paid calls and demanded I serve him tea, as if death watercolored the garden backdrop and asked for a critique.  I have grown comfortable with his presence, or at least, I have stopped fighting or fleeing from his penumbra.  

I have grown use to the absence of joy that comes from inside me.  I have manufactured joy, have siphoned off just a little joy from those engulfed in it.  It is second hand and yet, I have been grateful for the taste of it. I have needed to chase and catch it if I was to feel any of it at all.  

And then, all of a sudden, my heart is in my throat, I am prepared to tremble in anticipation, I am singing all day.

“from joy
to joy to joy, from wing to wing,
from blossom to blossom to
impossible blossom, to sweet impossible blossom.”

Sunday at Castle Island, Boston
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not a poem

I am not a poet. When I was young and when I was younger than I am now, I did not even have the patience to read poetry. Too few word, too many thoughts left in breaths, too many questions in spare phrases, too much for me to unwrap. I wanted prose that left no nuance unexamined and unexplained in long wordy paragraphs. I thought I would read poetry when I was old.

And so, now I must be old. I have favorite poets. I even know a few. I cannot do what they do, but I admire their work the way I admire what painters and sculptors do. I think I understand their craft, to some small extent, because every so often, words come out of me when I sit to write, that edge closer to what poets do than what I usually scribble down.

And that happened this morning.

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Posted on by Suzanne Buchko 0