Collaborative Poetry Throwdown 2023

On March 3, I issued a Collaborative Poetry Throwdown challenge on Facebook, Instagram, and in my weekly newsletter. This was an invitation to participate in a collective poem by adding lines jump-started by a specific prompt, after which I would piece the lines together (taking a few editorial liberties) and share the new piece in its entirety.

The line in the image to the right is from one of my 10-line Tuesday poems from almost 6 years ago, called “how to write about stillness.” For this edition of my Collaborative Poetry Throwdown, I invited participants to write one line about something extraordinary but unseen that was taking place in their lives. Maybe it was inkling of a thought or a hope. Maybe it was something they were proud of that no one knew about (yet). Maybe it was a wish for something that was still gathering its seeds. Or a moment they experienced that was still humming inside them, like a tuning fork.

Thank you to the following participants for their lines:  
Amy Adams, Carolyn Chilton Casas, Carolyn Sargent, Cathe Brown, Celenia Delsol, Christine McDonald, Deb Reynolds, Deborah Perpetua, Diana Feiger, Edie Kausch, Elissa Salter, Gabriele Glang, Gahl Rinat, Glori Zeltzer, Janis Brams, Jean Martell, Jen Cass, Jen Meades, Jennie Quinn, Jennifer Olsen, Jenny McGlothern, Joni Brennan-Hazlett, Karen Ashby, Karen Dino, Kate Lalor, Laura Diamond, Lisa Quealy, Lyn Hopper, Margaret Bednar, Marilyn Oberhausen, Mary McHugh, Meg Weston, Ozzie Nogg, Patricia Dias, Rosanne Cassidy, Sandra Anton, Susan Johnson, Tanya Levy, Tara Morin, and Valerie Wolf.

when we were owls

Someone is always saying change is coming.
What are we to do about it?
We keep grabbing at sand, trying to hang on
as the wind twirls around us.
And yet, I want to believe love will always heal our broken world,
that it is possible to imagine a garden in the middle
of summer or think about flying gracefully while standing
on one leg and brushing your teeth. I want to believe
inside of us is a clearing where we can drink in
the stillness and hear only rhythms, tiny seeds
making their microscopic blueprint toward a bursting triumph.

One breath at a time—this is my understanding of a higher power.
This is the way we can drop into our bodies and receive the morning
as a miracle. But how do we open our senses and enter
the shared air—the heart, the soul—of all living things?
How do we learn to trust what has been searching for us?
How can we believe that even if a sliver of shrapnel threatens it,
joy can be effortless.

The roots have always held us.
It may take three years before we’ll take the next
important first steps toward something only now
just standing on its edge. Maybe we’ll have eight
more decades on the planet to hold the answers
we are asking for. Maybe a chapter
we’d been avoiding for months will fall out of the sky,
like manna, and we will know that each moment in time,
however brief, offers a chance to change direction.
That we can walk, unseen, along the path and rest
in the way things are, and that was hemmed in
by unpacked boxes has the promise
of a future and we can stand in with our feet
fully planted, glad to love the earth for one
more day.

A soul knows that without mist there is no dew.
We can discover again how memory
can become action and in turn, purpose. We can hold
onto true north because it’s happening in so many ways.
Right now, for example, three publishers
are reading a manuscript, where black ink had glistened once.
Just when someone had thought they had reached
a state of invisibility, they have been seen, and are preening
their feathers, rising from the ashes, preparing to ignite. 

There is a soft and buttery smoothness inside when we say
Yes. When we make a space. When, despite our questioning,
we begin to take in a bit more, to floss regularly, to forgive.
Maybe we are learning how to pray, how to listen
to our own blue-flame voice.

Let’s picture, with our eyes closed,
the soft, feathered bodies of owls,
heads swiveling side to side. It’s a shift of heart we need
as much as place. Neurons in our brains are rewiring into
new chords of hope.

I wonder, have we ever listened like this
to the rain?