Category: Slice of Life

Slice of Life

Thank you, Two Writing Teachers, for creating a community of writers and a safe place to share.

Today’s prompt at the Ethical ELA Open Write is to create a one-sentence poem. Such an easy way in. I read back through my notebook until I found an entry that had a bit that seemed like it could be a poem.

photo via Unsplash
QUIET WATERS

In that last year, I circled the lake,
investigating every cove along the shore
until I discovered the outfall --
a small stream that would carry me away, 
silently slipping into quiet waters
where a single paddle stroke would do,
where simply floating for an entire morning
would be an acceptable option.


©Mary Lee Hahn, 2021

Writing in a community is such a pleasure, and I am blessed with so many different communities. Poetry Friday is a constant, as are my two new poetry groups — Sisters and Inklings. I like dipping into the Slice of Life and Ethical ELA communities. The best, though, is the community of one — just me and my notebook most every day after exercise and before reading.

Slice of Life: Home

Thank you, TwoWritingTeachers for hosting this community!

Can you still call it home if you’ve lived elsewhere longer than all the years you spent growing up there? Can you still call it home if there are no living relatives there, just some boxes in your mom’s friend’s barn? I hope so, because I do.

It’s home because the sidewalk I scuffed along from the back screen door to the little building where my bike was stored is there. The little building that sat in the shade of the ash tree that turns a glorious yellow in the fall. The ash tree that shared the yard with a weeping birch with fronds that grew down to the grass making a cool and shady secret hiding place in the summer. (We cried when that tree had to be cut down. Perhaps the ash tree is gone now, too. I’m not sure I want to know because I remember how much it hurt to see that mom’s iris had been dug up. Will the maple in the front yard be gone?)

I’m going home at the end of the month, and it will be both home and not home in the same way that I am both the child who grew up there and not that child at all. There will be change and constancy, differences and similarities, familiar and unfamiliar. In the wind, I will hear echoes of my mother’s voice and my father’s laugh and on Main Street, I’ll be greeted by people who remember me but whose names I either never knew or can’t remember. And it will be okay. It will all be okay. I will be at home.