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Archive for February, 2019

Dear Friends,

A week or so ago, I sent a poem titled Secret Agents, which outlined the story of a woman I have not yet met (Sherry Richert Belul) who sent me $5 in the mail as a reminder that abundance is everywhere. Since then, a small secret agent revolution has been happening, and Sherry and I have launched Secret Agents of Change!

On Feb. 17, Random Acts of Kindness Day, we will start our Secret Agent Challenge: Operation Love–seven days of simple “assignments” that spread secret joy, good-will and kindness in the world around you. Will you join us?

Here is a link to a video in which we talk about how we met through small acts of kindness and how we decided to create the Secret Agents of Change.

And here is a link to join our Facebook group, which is how we will be giving out the secret missions.

If you are eager to be part of the Secret Agent Challenge but don’t belong to Facebook, then email me. I am sure we can come up with some way to get you involved and in the loop! It’s a kindness revolution!

Rosemerry

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Michelangelo wrote his love

forty-eight funeral epigrams—

not one of them brought back

the shoulders like chiseled marble,

the purr of his voice, his lips raw silk

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One Irreversible

 

 

 

late apology—

a week after it died of drought,

offering the plant water

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One Brevity

 

 

 

all its life

it never knew

it could be so bright—

this log just before

it’s ash

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What was the best advice you got as a teenager?

Question asked in the Positive Youth Development Training

 

 

Sitting in the old one-room schoolhouse

and trying to remember any piece of advice,

I come up blank, which makes me think brain scientists

are right: the prefrontal cortex had not yet kicked in.

Makes me think, why give a teen advice?

They won’t listen now. They won’t remember it later.

 

But then, clear as a clap, I am standing on stage

in my pedal pushers and my fake Izod shirt, and I hear

John Klug’s voice howl from the theater’s back row,

“I can’t means I won’t.” That is right before

he strides to the front of the stage, picks up the easel

and throws it into the empty audience,

 

where it lands in the training I attend thirty years later,

and I stare at it beside me, astonished he threw it,

but even more astonished at how simple it was,

the way he changed my life, how that afternoon

he guaranteed that every time I hear the phrase I can’t,

I see the chance to say instead, I can do it. I’ll try.

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One Friendship

—for Kyra

 

walking the icy hill

every step a triumph—

and us,

crazy enough

to walk it together

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They say opportunity knocks, but then
once it’s in, I’ve seen it punch. Explode.
Manhandle. Demand. Require. Kick.
Throttle. Strangle. Rebuke. Erode.

If only it only knocked, perhaps
I’d be more inclined to answer the door,
but sometimes, once in, it takes all you have,
and then, when you’re spent, it takes more.

*Dear Readers … this is just to say that this is NOT the poem I thought I was sitting down to write, but this is the poem that showed up. And any of you who have taken a class with me know that I am a big fan of the dictum of Jack Mueller, Obey the poem’s emerging form. So I did. I think I almost scared myself with this poem. Enough that I thought twice about sending it out. But here it is …

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Every Time

 

 

and after the lights were out

and after my mother had kissed me goodnight

I would pull from under my pillow

 

the book, the flashlight, and for hours

in the quiet house, no matter how difficult

the day had been, no matter how low I felt,

 

for those hours I was so glad to be alive

in someone else’s story, and every time,

when I when I tugged long enough on its lines,

 

I could not help but notice

how each story was my story, too.

 

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Bushwhack

 

 

I followed the road as if it were a teacher.

It went up, I went up. It turned, I turned.

It was a long time before I relearned

that the road is not the only way to go.

The first day I walked away from the gravel,

I fell. That was the day I learned

staying upright is not what’s most important.

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Beneath wide bands of ice,

the river hides, barely visible,

but when we come closer,

 

we can hear how alive it is,

playful as ever, babbling, rippling.

And somewhere in and around the water,

 

the stonefly larva keep moving,

the midges produce their own antifreeze,

the damselfly eggs diapause,

 

all of them adept at surviving the cold.

There are times I have wondered

how love survives, even when

 

we starve it, freeze it, offer it nothing,

turn our attention the other way.

Perhaps it adapts, as macroinvertebrates do.

 

Or perhaps it is more like the river itself,

persistent, singing as it goes, making its own path,

and all we ever need do is meet it.

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