For the third consecutive April I have participated in poetry month by writing a poem a day. My nephew Ben invited me to write with his friend Becca and him the year I was recovering from hearing loss. It was a great gift that year and the next. This year, there were four of us writing and reading each other’s work; we invited another nephew/cousin to write with us as well. Ben and Becca have been writing seriously for several years since college. I think they might say writing is their main work, though not their means of financial income, and they have both had poems published. Christopher teaches English, including creative writing, at the University of Belize. So I am outclassed. But never mind. Ben’s first invitation surprised me but I was in a place where little daunted me, so I gladly and mostly unselfconsciously participated, even when I figured out that they were really good: thoughtful and skilled, and my poetry writing had, up to that point, been pretty casual.
I find it a daunting task to write a poem every day. The rules are simple. Write something; and expect your output to be pretty uneven. Mine certainly was. April is a busy time for me, especially at its end when preparing and planting the garden suddenly becomes urgent, and I wrote a lot of Haiku to keep up.
We have quite different lives: Becca and Ben live in the city; Christopher and I both homestead in more rural areas: I’m in the midwest, he’s in Central America. They are millennials aged 25-35. I just became eligible for medicare. So the gamut of life experiences jibes and diverges in interesting ways.
This year because of the pandemic, my sisters, Chris and Ben’s mothers plus one more, decided to do their own poetry group; (maybe me writing with their sons was additional incentive? ) We sisters exchanged poems and Chris’s wife also wrote with the women’s group. Soon Chris’s son, 10, and daughter, 6, were writing poems too.
All in all it was a good exercise for everyone involved. Even when I am dissatisfied with my own poems, the act of writing helps me to read others’ work more attentively. Seeing comments and suggestions from others does that as well. And the best thing is to see the lives and thoughts of other people through the special vector of poetry which, at the least, slows us down and helps us to pay attention in particular ways. I saw decided growth in the ability to describe and communicate, in the skill of turning meaning into experiencing and experience into meaning. I heard from a wide range of voices even within our small, mostly family circle. For the most part the writers had more non-earning time available and poems were a positive outlet during this long sheltering in place. It diverted us from the unsettling news of the day which tended to become obsessive for some, and grounded us in realities we take for granted but pay little attention to. I would guess, to a person, this exercise made our home quarantine desirable rather than a mere confinement.
While my own writing was more difficult this year, there were a few poems I would gladly share. After a few days of frustrated attempts and discards, I wrote something for April 30 that pleased at least one reader and was balm to my own soul.
To descending trill of thrush
in the hastening night;
to the last white blooms that shine
in the failing light;
to the whoosh of feathered wings
in nocturnal flight,
let our yearning turn.
To brisk autumnal air
as the light amends;
to brightly colored leaves that
after frost descend;
to abundant harvest given
and brought in again,
let our yearning turn.
To twirling winter flakes
that dampen sound;
to streak of cardinal red
across whitened ground;
to the snow clumped arms of trees
and their lacy crowns,
let our yearning turn.
To earliest shoots of green
that the eye drinks in;
to the softening line of trees
at the woodland’s rim;
to the rising of the grass
after warming rain,
let our yearning turn.
