Today (Thursday, April 16) I needed a break from the unrelenting frazzlement of the U.S. news cycle, so I popped over to Al Jazeera for headlines from Europe. It was quite refreshing.
I’ve found my way back into a regular poetry writing routine and simultaneously I might have found my NPM project. As I read the NYT or other assorted news sources, I borrow bits and pieces and write a tricube.
The Poetry Sisters challenge for this month was composing tricubes — poems with three stanzas, three lines in each stanza, and three syllables in each line. At our pep talk/work session last Sunday, we wondered collectively if we would post a single tricube, or if it made sense for them to come in groups of three.
Obviously, I decided on three.
The first was written after I went for a walk about two-thirds of the way through our total snow accumulation. It was magical. So quiet, so peaceful.
The second is not meant to take away from the tragedy of the murders of Renee Good and Alex Pretti, but instead as a reminder that we need to guard ourselves from compartmentalizing our outrage and make sure we don’t just mourn the deaths of those who might look like us or love like us.
The third is a memo to myself that joy is a valid form of resistance, as are creativity and self care. There is a time to march, a time to call senators and send emails, a time to sign petitions…and a time to bake bread, mend a shirt, or stitch a memory from last fall’s trip to Norway.
Here’s what the other Poetry Sisters came up with this month:
Renee Good was, of course, a multitude of other beings as well. We all are.
But in 2020, she won one of Old Dominion’s most prestigious accolades, the American Academy of American Poets Prize.
Rajiv Mohabir was serving as a judge for the contest in 202o and selected her poem as the winner. He said “…he never had the chance to meet or interact with Ms. Good, as he was teaching in Boston then and the contest was held remotely that year. But he said he was struck by the poem’s idea that “we have to kill something in order to know it,” and since Ms. Good’s killing, has been ruminating on its ending words:
“that the bible and qur’an and bhagavad gita are sliding long hairs behind my ear like mom used to & exhaling from their mouths ‘make room for wonder’ —
all my understanding dribbles down the chin onto the chest & is summarized as:
Here’s my poetic contriBLUEtion to the conversation. (I have no idea why the two images won’t line up. We’ll just let a wonky poetry form have a wonky look on the page.)
Heidi has this week’s Poetry Friday Roundup at my juicy little universe and reminds us that small things can be enormous. Let’s carry that vibe forward.
A(nother) Year of Reading 