Me. I’m to blame. I had the challenge for the Poetry Sisters this month. I found it in THE CREATIVITY PROJECT, edited by Colby Sharp. Each of the forty-four contributors to the book submitted two prompts. Colby doled out the prompts, each person receiving two from which they could choose one to use “to inspire an awesome creation.” The book is filled with those wildly creative creations! In addition, the book contains “forty-four fresh new prompts, one from each contributor, intended for you, to inspire your own creations.” I chose Colby’s challenge from page 257:
It was all my fault.
This prompt has been haunting me a bit. First there was the article earlier in the week from Maria Popova’s Marginalian, “How to Reconcile Your Most Painful Mistakes: The Life-Shaping Difference Between Regret and Remorse” containing this perfectly spot-on bit:
“You know it, that awful moment your coherent self-image shatters and a part of you, shadowy and untended, splits off to cause harm and havoc as the rest of you watches helplessly, wincing. You know the next moment, too — the desperate wish for an undo button you know cannot be had, no matter your protestations and prostrations.”
Oh, yeah. The list of things in my life that have been all my fault are definitely wince- and cringe-worthy. I couldn’t imagine writing about any of those.
Then Seth Godin’s blog post today dropped into my inbox with the title “Responsibility, fault, blame and shame” and this zinger of an ending:
“Shame’s the deal killer, the dream destroyer and toxic. It’s often on offer, but we don’t have to accept it.”
We don’t have to accept the shame. Let’s write that on our hearts and move forward.
Luckily, I had several very fruitful inspirations for my poem(s) today. First, in our zoom on Sunday, some of the other Poetry Sisters suggested using an inanimate object, a cascade of events, an environmental crisis, or a mentor poem such as “13 Ways of Looking at a Blackbird” or “This is Not to Say.” Those suggestions helped free me from my life-list of blunders. But it was Joyce Sidman’s book DEAR ACORN (LOVE, OAK), which sits at the end of my desk, that gave me my entry point. That book, plus some recent events in my garden.
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Tricia has this week’s Poetry Friday roundup at The Miss Rumphius Effect, and the rest of the Poetry Sisters’ offerings are here:
Laura @ Laura Purdie Salas
Liz @ Liz Garton Scanlon
Sara @ Read Write Believe
Tanita @ {fiction, instead of lies}
