We have seen kindness in action during the last several weeks. My 16-year-old grand girl, Gracee AKA Grace AKA Amazing Grace, was in a serious car accident in June. I’ve been in Michigan (I forgot to mention where I actually was in the below video) since then to help in her recovery. While here, I’ve […]
First Words Friday: Week 5 – 2019 – Braiding Sweetgrass
I’m all about nature writing, especially when the words are woven as beautifully as they are in this book, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants by Robin Wall Kimmerer. Okay, so the last part of that title sounds… well, boring. Trust me, it’s not. Elizabeth Gilbert calls the book, “A […]
Commit Poetry: Let Evening Come by Jane Kenyon
Tweetspeak Poetry has formed a “By Heart” Community, and we are memorizing a poem each month. For December it was “Let Evening Come” by Jane Kenyon. Having lived for years in the country and walked the roads in the evenings, I can see these images and hear the night sounds–though a chafing instead of a […]
The Grenfell Fire, Friends, and Food
The fire started in the kitchen of flat 16 on the fourth floor of Grenfell Tower, a 24-story block in west London. Ethiopian-born Behailu Kebede had lived there for almost 25 years. Just before 1 a.m. on June 14, 2017, his smoke alarm shrieked, and he discovered smoke coming from behind his refrigerator-freezer. He called the […]
Anna Akhmatova and Friends
When Anatoly Nayman recounts his first meeting with the Russian poet, Anna Akhmatova, he describes her gesture of hospitality. The woman who had let me into the flat brought in a saucer on which lay a lonely boiled carrot, which had been peeled perfunctorily and had already dried up somewhat. Perhaps such was her diet, perhaps it […]
Commit Poetry: Tapping on the Walls
What about tapping on the walls? Imagine a 5 x 5 square numbered 1 to 5 horizontally along the top and vertically down the left side. Picture the letters of the alphabet running in order across each row with the letters C and K occupying the same space on the first row in the […]
Commit Poetry: Romeo and Juliet – Masks and Divisions
We are sitting at the edge of Michigan’s own slice of the Caribbean—Torch Lake. The water is teal, sometimes turquoise. A handful of children are making little crayfish corrals of sand, circled and fortified by rocks, catching the creatures first with a net and pail. As for us, we’re fortified with turkey sandwiches and bottles of […]
Dared: To Paint a Wall Chartreuse
Chartreuse. The color of your creativity. That phrase pinged around my head this morning. I wrote it on an index card, attributed it to L.L. Barkat, and pinned it to my bulletin board. But then I wondered, “Did she really say that—like that?” Laura Barkat has unofficially mentored me for several years. Last […]
Commit Poetry: Committing Romeo (and other stuff)
Here we go again. I swear—I can’t seem to resist a good dare, especially during National Poetry Month and Tweetspeak’s “Year of Shakespeare.” This time, it’s to memorize three sections of Romeo and Juliet. Why these particular three sections? Why not ones I’m already familiar with like . . . Like what? Follow me to Tweetspeak […]
Commit Poetry: Ozymandias, Breaking Bad, and a Duck
I read a Facebook post on January 11 of this year announcing that it was the 200th anniversary of the day The Examiner published Percy Bysshe Shelley’s poem, “Ozymandias.” Ozzy who? I had to look up the pronunciation. Several folks say Ah-zee-mahn-dee-us. Others say Ah-zee-man-dee-us. But some say to fit the meter of the sonnet, the name […]
