“Tell me how you lived your dream in some place, and I’ll tell you who you are.” ~Mahmoud Darwish It started as just a 30-day dream dare with Mahmoud Darwish. It’s been 60 days, and I’m not done with him yet. This poetry dare arrived in two parts: first, read a poem a day […]
A Random Act of Poetry for #raopoetryday
Four years ago, a still unknown someone gifted me a writer’s retreat at Laity Lodge in the Texas Hill Country. I got the call while sitting outside at a nursing home with my mom who had just been diagnosed with a brain tumor following a fall. The only workshop still open was a poetry […]
When I Was No Writer And My Words Were Poo
“I like good strong words that mean something.” ~Jo March (Little Women) I chinned the rusty barrel near the hem of our woods. The carbon petals curled and separated. The ashes fluttered high and melted into the atmosphere. Cremation complete. The weekly newspaper over in the next county had rejected my fiction story—the […]
Dreaming With Darwish: Nurture Hope
The poet Mahmoud Darwish believed there needed to be a time gap between an event and the writing about it. My thoughts about this latest dare are like “cotton ginned by the wind.” Maybe I need a wider gap. I’ve sat most of this past week in “A State of Siege,” a long text […]
Dream Poem #4: Dreaming With Darwish
Well, things have been a bit quiet around here (the blog) for several weeks, and I don’t know where the summer has gone. My daughter is still displaced and dealing with insurance after her house fire. We’ve been working slowly on some house projects, and there have been a few trips out of town, […]
Becoming Mindful in Place: Proof
Proof If I’d not glanced out the window at just that moment, I would have missed the flash of blue against blue. I wouldn’t have seen it dart onto a crabapple branch and then light on the backboard behind the net, unmistakable in its orange vest. I scooped up my camera and […]
Becoming Mindful in Place: Mosquito
There’s a cloud of them, forming and re-forming like an angry amoeba. They’re battering the windows like marauding movie zombies. They. Want. My. Blood. “But it’s AB,” I yell at them. “My blood is AB-negative. You like it O. O-positive. I read that somewhere.” It must be my scent. Or the fact I’m now […]
Dream Poem #2: Tom and I
Tom and I We sat on the edge of an operating room table, Tom and I, dangling our legs and eating peaches while juice dribbled down our chins and puddled on the oyster shell floor. A nurse was measuring the walls with a coffee spoon, and a hippopotamus brought a plate of cinnamon toast and a pot of tea. […]
Becoming Mindful in Place: When You Don’t Feel Like Walking
I’ve been crying again and don’t really feel like doing this walking assignment for my Becoming Mindful in Place workshop, but I carry my key and a heavy heart out to the garage. I drive Hope, my new red Jeep, down the paved entrance lined by American flags and through the gate. I bear […]
Dream Poem#1: Hog Stew, Krispy Kremes, and Ann Voskamp
Hog Stew, Krispy Kremes, and Ann Voskamp The quicksand tried to swallow me. Then the train came and an elephant held out his trunk. When I grasped it, it wiggled into a rainbow’d snake that flung me into the red Corvette convertible in Canadian National auto carrier #1000 graffiti’d with gifts. We snaked our […]
