Poetry Friday: Wisdom (and the Roundup is HERE!)

Welcome to the 2025 edition of Poetry Friday! I’m thrilled to host the party and I can’t wait to see what dreams, resolutions, and rituals you bring to this potluck of poetry!

My dreams for 2025 include travel, scraps of fabric that become something else, and a garden filled with more native perennials. My resolutions, which trend towards the suggestion end of the mandatory –> suggestion spectrum, involve some painting, some art journaling, some stitching, some poetry reading, and a particular bi-weekly exercise class. Our New Year ritual is to listen to Strauss waltzes all day long on our local classical radio station, then end the day watching the Vienna Philharmonic New Year’s Concert on PBS. It doesn’t feel like a new year until we’ve clapped along to the Radetzky March.

Last year, Heidi invited the Inklings to participate in her family’s Yuletide celebration with a mobile of poetry prompts for Solstice through New Year’s Day. I shared my drafts for Generosity and Laughter last year.

For this month’s Inklings challenge, we returned to the mobile for new inspiration. I chose “What wisdom do you yearn for?” on 12/30 for my poem.

Here’s what the rest of the Inklings came up with, if life gave them the elbow room this month to write:

Heidi @my juicy little universe
Molly @Nix the Comfort Zone
Margaret @Reflections on the Teche
Linda @A Word Edgewise
Catherine @Reading to the Core

And here’s the roundup of all the First Poetry Friday of the New Year posts:


48 thoughts on “Poetry Friday: Wisdom (and the Roundup is HERE!)”

  2. Happy New Year!
    Today’s Wisdom sounds like an excellent collection! I do love the humor and seriousness in this poem. There is a lot of play here. I was so intrigued by the tip on Uppercase that you gave me a couple of weeks ago, I splurged on a subscription–and am already so glad I did! Alright, since 2025 has started, I’m ready to jump in with both feet.

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  3. I love the idea of leaning into the suggestion, rather than the mandatory side of goals and resolutions – I remember reading somewhere about someone who makes joyful resolutions, like committing to try foods from new cuisines, or listening to new genres of music, or watching movies with subtitles – a goal that is designed to bring joy, not elicit feelings of guilt, failure or shame. And I am all for joy.

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  4. Yay for the “Conjunctions,” and “the”Land of Grammar,” all living together in Peace! Terrific poem Mary Lee reminds me of the The Phantom Tollbooth’s, “Kingdom of Wisdom” and its two cities: “Dictionopolis, the land of words, and Digitopolis, the land of numbers.” And Yay for carrying forward all your creative endeavors, thanks!

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  5. Mary Lee ~ that last line, “never losing sight of the hopefulness of YET”…oh my gosh. I’m going to put that whole sentence on my wall. Thank you!

    Note: TeachingAuthor posts always go live around 3:30am CST on Friday–so if someone clicks on it now, they’ll need to re-read that beautiful sentence.

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  8. I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United Land of Grammar,

    and to the Parts of Speech for which it stands,

    one Nation under AND

    with the liberty and justice of YET!

    Deeply fantastic, with, yes, that combination of flirtatious whimsy with a backbone of one-room schoolmarm who chops all the wood for the stove and then dances with Grandpa Otis to the Radetzky March. (That’s your poem, not you.)

    But I should hang out with you more.

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  9. Mary Lee,

    Thank you for the new schedule, and for keeping us organized here on Poetry Friday. Your New Year’s suggestions sound glorious. Enjoy! Your personified conjunctions are perfect. I’m feeling like I’m getting to know them more through your poem.

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  12. Happy New Year, Mary Lee, with gratitude for a poem that will bring light into the world all the year. One year our class motto was “Remember the word “yet”, so they would adore that you brought it as the finale to your poem. “Agreed!”, it’s the most hopeful word!

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    1. Happy New Year! I love knowing that your class motto included YET! I imagine that word remains written on the hearts of those long ago students!

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  13. Oh I think my comment might have gotten lost in cyberspace while I was trying to log in. 🙂

    I love that you have a plan for the year with crafting and exercising and writing! And I love that your wisdom for the new year comes from WORDS!

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    1. Sorry that cyberspace ate your first comment, but glad you came back! Here’s to the WORDS of hope, resilience, connection, and love.

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  15. Happy New Year, Mary Lee! Yay for conjunctions! AND was my OLW last year — so longing for a softening of what qualifies in life! And here she is with all of her cousins showing us how joyful life really can be if we might just take a small pause with any/all of them! True wisdom! Thank you for hosting!

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  16. Mary Lee, I am all for FOR instead of NOR and love negating negative with BUT. Using the word YET brings joy since I know I am not at the place I want to be. Your poem bring such wisdom that I need. Thank you for always offering wonderful poetic pieces to linger with. May your weekend be filled with more dreams and resolutions to enjoy life.

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  17. I’m reading from a hotel room so I hope this comment works from my phone. Your poem is exemplary and I want to share it with students next week. As others have said “yet” is my favorite line as I look for hope in this new year. I hope to post (again limited by a phone) today. Thanks for keeping Poetry Friday alive and well. It feeds my soul.

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    1. Poetry Friday feeds my soul, too, as does our Inklings group. I’m glad you were able to join via phone. Hats off for not letting tech stop you!

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  18. Oh, Mary Lee, I love everything about this! It can be interpreted in so many ways — we can each adopt it and adapt it to our own needs, goals, and psyches. Cheers for the conjunctions! And cheers for poets who make us think about things we haven’t thought of YET.

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    1. You should see all the drafts I wrote that approached “what wisdom do I yearn for” in a head-on way. I agree with you that it turned out much more effective to write with a bit of side-eye so that my yearning could be adopted by others in their own way.

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  20. What a delight to read your Wisdom from the Conjunctions and think of all the possibilities in those words, ways we may never have considered them. Thanks for this new way to think about some of our ordinary words.

    Thanks for hosting and leading this group of poetry lovers. I hope to show up more in this new year.

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  21. Oh, Mary Lee, your poem is so fun and so, so clever! Three cheers for the wisdom of the conjunctions, their emphasis on generous inclusion and their ending note of hope. I love how you rolled from your title right into your poem: it reminded me of Sesame Street…or was it Electric Company? Anyway, intended or not, that nuance tickled me. What a fantastic response to the prompt! Thanks so much for hosting this weekend!

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    1. Because of you, I pay WAY more attention to my titles these days! I love poems where the title is the first line of the poem, so I wrote one that worked that way!

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  22. I love the Yuletide prompts! And here’s to amplifying the FOR and diminishing the NOR. For slowing our stitch and writing more.

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  24. Agreement, parallelism, and juxtaposition are all synonyms for conjunctions. Isn’t it amazing that one part of speech can do all that work in our writing?

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  25. SO, creative, inspired, Mary Lee, I would never in short nor long time never would my pen, pencil or keyboard have dreamed up poem gift as ecquisite as this, for writers and readers, yet, you inspire me to… dream. Wishing you all your 2025 wishes & more, galore. No new post at Bookseedstudio, but TY for rounding up, hosting & always leading in so lively a fashion.

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