has a double-hung window inside it,
the kind that allows you to let in
a little more air when you feel as if you
can’t breathe. Sometimes, seeing through it
helps you find a new way to frame the world.
Sometimes it makes it easier
to feel as if there’s distance
between you and what the poem says,
as if you’re on the outside looking in
instead of the other way around.
Though when it’s dark, you can’t help
but see your own reflection.
When a poem makes you uncomfortable,
its window opens wide enough to let you
climb out, but not without things
getting a little awkward. I mean,
you are climbing out the window
instead of using the poem’s back door.
But mostly, the window lets the light change
so every time you re-enter the poem,
it feels different—familiar, but new;
and you wander around inside the lines
and wonder, did the poem change?
Or did you?
Archive for November, 2024
Every Poem
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged ars poetica, reader, window on November 30, 2024| 5 Comments »
One on Thanksgiving
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged paradox, prayer, thanksgiving on November 29, 2024| 13 Comments »
one hand opens in grief
the other in gratitude
pressing them together to pray
A Partial List of Gratefulnesses
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged gratefulness, thanksgiving on November 27, 2024| 2 Comments »
There’s the giddy gratefulness that sparkles
like morning sun on the river and the peaceful
gratefulness that soothes like warm wind.
There’s the gratefulness that almost hurts
as it squeezes tight around the heart,
the gratefulness that arrives quiet as cat’s paws
in the night, and the gratefulness that thrums
and swirls in us as if we’re a sky full of starlings.
Sometimes it opens as slowly
as a giant bromeliad in Bolivia, taking years,
even decades before we are ready to see it.
Sometimes it comes dressed in black.
There’s begrudging gratefulness, bedazzling
gratefulness, gratefulness that stands
on its hind legs and roars. Gratefulness
that soars like a tetherless kite. Gratefulness
that sneaks in mouselike—like an ermine
who knows just where to find the small gaps
in the rocks. Every gratefulness a chance
to glimpse what is sacred right here,
to remember our place in the living world.
Every gratefulness the chance to revel again
in the sheer miracle that we belong.
Letter to the Parts of Me I Have Tried to Exile
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged exile, grace, parts of self, walls, wholeness on November 27, 2024| 20 Comments »
I’m sorry. I thought banishing you was the way to become better, more perfect, more good, more free. The irony: I thought if I cut you off and cast you out, if I built the walls high enough, then the parts left would be more whole. As if the sweet orange doesn’t need the toughened rind, the bitter seed. As if the forest doesn’t need the blue fury of fire. It didn’t work, did it, the exile? You were always here, jangling the hinges, banging at the door, whispering through the cracks. Left to myself, I wouldn’t have known to take down the walls, nor would I have had the strength to do so. That act was grace disguised as disaster. But now that the walls are rubble, it is also grace that teaches me to want to embrace you, grace that guides me to be gentle, even with the part of me that would still try to exile any other part. It is grace that invites me to name all parts beloved. How honest it all is. How human. I promise to keep learning how to know you as my own, to practice opening to what at first feels unwanted, meet it with understanding, trust all belongs, welcome you home. |
Three Upcoming Online Classes
Posted in Uncategorized on November 27, 2024| Leave a Comment »
The Mystery of Grief: Writing into the Loss
December 4, 2024
7-9pm ET, 6-8pm CT, 5-7pm MT and 4-6pm PT
Zoom, recorded
$15, scholarships available
When we lose loved ones, writing can be a powerful tool for helping us remember them, helping us re-encounter the world without them, and helping us re-know ourselves as the loss transforms us.
In this two-hour online program, Evermore Poet Laureate Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer will offer a few suggestions for writing. Together, we will read poems about grief and discuss them. We will have chances to do our own writing, there will be optional time for sharing what we wrote, and we will have time to reflect on the effect writing has on us.
The poems we read and write won’t be able to hold all the feelings, but they will offer us a way to touch our grief, to connect with the lives and deaths of our loved ones, to give voice to our anguish, to find compassion for each other, to fall in love with the world that is left, to express our heartache, and to explore the landscape of our hearts.
GET YOUR TICKETS NOW! Questions? please contact jena@evermore.org
*
Ordinary Sacred: Writing into Being
December 5 & 6
with Marcia Eames-Sheavly and Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer
$175/ Zoom
Please join me for a one-and-a-half-day online poetry retreat as we notice and honor the “ordinary sacred” as a doorway into quieting the busyness of our lives and being with it all, just as it is. These are challenging times. It is equally true that when we pick our heads up and look around, we are often surprised to find that we are entwined with the sacred in the ordinary. There is so much to notice, be with and celebrate!
In this one-and-a-half-day retreat, we will nurture a trustworthy space to invite in an exploration of our bodies, our lives, our homes, our communities as precious, as sanctuary. What happens when we deeply draw our attention to our surroundings? How does it shift things for us? Through the Courage & Renewal approach and through poetry writing and exploration, this offering invites you to connect with yourself and others—to slow down, reflect and notice, while experiencing poetry through the gateways of listening, reading, creative writing, imagination, and shared exploration. With the discoveries we make, we can then enjoy—and capture in writing—reminders of the fullness of our lives as holy ground.
Ordinary Sacred: Writing into Being will be grounded in the Courage & Renewal® approach which you can learn more about in Parker J. Palmer’s book, A Hidden Wholeness. All are welcome.
For more information or to register, visit here.
Marcia Eames-Sheavly and poet-teacher-storyteller Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer will co-facilitate this unique mini-retreat experience.
There is a second retreat in this series on March entitled The Quickening: Writing into Doing. You may enroll in either/both. If you sign up for both, the cost is $300 ($150 each).
*
Love, Death, Desire & Madness: Writing into the Sacredness of Our Humanity
7:00 – 9:00pm ET, Wednesdays
Jan 8, Jan 15, Jan 22, and Jan 29, 2025
ZOOM
$125.00 general public; One Spirit Alumni – $100.00
One of the greatest gifts of poetry is it allows us to explore our humanness with compassion and playfulness, even when the subjects challenge us. Psychologist Michael Brant DeMaria identifies four topics we often shy from meeting openly—love, death, desire and madness—and in this four-part workshop series, we’ll circle each of them through reading and writing poetry.
Curiosity will be our guide. How might exploring raw, vulnerable states open us to depth, startle us with wonder, and invite a more profound relationship with the sacred? In each session, we’ll read poems, write poems of our own, discuss process, and have a chance to share the writing we do together—or not. All levels of writing are welcome.
For more information and to register, visit here.
There Was a Time I Disdained Hope
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged hope, mystery, seed on November 26, 2024| 7 Comments »
But now
what can I do
but marvel
as hope grows
like a seed
without soil,
putting down
roots despite
lack. And isn’t
that what hope
is—a sprout
that grows
when conditions
are poor,
as if to prove
that sometimes
potential
depends less
on what
surrounds us,
more on what
is living
through us.
Only This World
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged climate change, conservation, earth, global warming on November 24, 2024| 12 Comments »
Only this world—
not some unknown chance
of life somewhere else,
only this here, this life,
this improbable chance
to be steward of meadow
and desert, mountain and cliff,
this chance to inhabit this
acre, this continent, this planet,
to know this frozen pond,
this slender stream, this dried grass,
this herd of mule deer, this darkness
that comes when our planet spins,
this light that arrives
on darkness’s edge.
Only this chance to sing
of this world, this disappearing
world, this world of emergence,
this world with its stars
and its bones, its prickles
and petals, its sweetness
and ache, this world
with its hopelessness
and, oh dare I say it,
its hope.
At the Grand Prix
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged connection, family, grand prix, love, race car on November 24, 2024| 6 Comments »
Nothing like walking in the forest,
this gathering in the grandstand
to watch race cars blur past each other,
scent of hot rubber acrid in the air,
not at all like wandering through
a sun-dazzled glade, moss soft
and green beneath my feet,
but sitting near the starting line
with hundreds of thousands of humans
with my daughter leaning into me,
my husband and my stepdaughter
and her husband beside me,
and the memory of my son knocking inside,
the heart proves again how it can fling wide
its gates for many kinds of joy,
many forms of beauty, even those
we’d never considered before.
The heart can sing for them all,
as tonight when it sings along
with the high-pitched roar
of the engines, the deep bass rumble
of the earth. Why should I be surprised?
There are infinite ways to feel connected, alive.
Immensity
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged immensity, las vegas, moon, perspective on November 23, 2024| 12 Comments »
Just past Circus Circus,
I see it down a side street,
the half moon low on the horizon,
nowhere near as bright or big
as the giant clown smiling above me.
I thrill in my certainty the moon
has grown no smaller.
But how real it seems in this moment,
this moment when the moon looks
littler than a soup bowl
for a giant neon clown
on the Las Vegas strip.
It’s enough to make me think
that other things that seem
so large are not. Enough
to make me long to be a student
of perspective. How quickly
the world changes when
we change the way we see it.
How powerful the invitation
to want to see what is true.
Driving Across Utah in the Dark
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged driving, night, time, utah on November 22, 2024| 2 Comments »
Perhaps a valley. Surely desert.
Perhaps a mountain range over there.
Perhaps a whole rhythm of ranges.
Slot canyons, too. And a ribbon
of trees along where a river might be,
the leaves not yet yellow,
the limbs not yet bare.
But all I see beyond pavement
and white and yellow lines,
is thick black night and
a memory of years ago,
driving this same highway,
falling in love with the way light
and shadow played across the vastness.
Somehow I am alive both now and then.
As we wind and climb and curve
through the dark,
I carry that old light with me.