challenge

28 days of gratitude

| Sheree

I’ve been leaning into my gratitude practice, but sometimes I’ve forgotten and let the simple task of listing one thing per day for which I am grateful for, slide.

What can I say, habits are made to be broken as well as upheld. And the bad habits always seem to be the ones we hold onto. While those habits that can actually benefit us and bring some joy, peace and happiness into our lives, we fuck up!

Gratitude is one of them. Gratitude helps people feel more positive about their lives. It fosters positive emotions as people reflect and savour and relish good experiences and events and relationships.

Gratitude improves people’s health and makes them more satisfied with what they have rather than focusing time and energy and regret on what they do not have.

It’s been proven that being more grateful makes you happier.

Well I could always do with being happier. Everyone could. And that is not to say that I’m not grateful for the life I have, the life I’m living and the people in it. But I could do with a reminder and become more consistent in my appreciation and gratitude.

Hence the next 28 days of gratitude. Holding myself to account in order to re-engage with this positive habit and hold on to happiness.

I want to wring out as much gratitude for each experience and happening and being in my life as I can. As life is a gift but sometimes I forget. So today we begin again.

It’s day one of my gratitude practice.

Today I am grateful for the lie in I managed to have before being woke up.

But I’m not complaining as I was woke up by Miss Ella for a cuddle. I’m grateful for my morning cuddle in bed with my daughter.

I’m grateful today for the hot black fresh brewed coffee that helped me wake up fully and engage with the day.

I’m grateful to have completed a big application and submitted it today and it helped to have company while completing this work.

I’m grateful for the time I got to be alone and focus on the tasks I had to complete today and not be distracted or interrupted.

I’m grateful today for the chocolate I managed to stuff into my face after said application was complete and I could rest

I’m grateful to be able to lie in bed now, warm and sleepy and write this gratitude list without having to think too hard about what or who I am grateful for today because I have ample choices to draw upon to share.

PAD/ 027 – Taking a risk

| Sheree

When is the last time you took a risk? How did it work out?

being an archive

oh it’s so sad/ she said/ when reading about slavery

oh it’s so wrong/ she said/ to anyone who’d listen

I listened/ to her going through the motions/ performing

they say peonies are showy flowers/ blousy bursting blooms/ for the show

at least peonies sense when it’s their time/ chance/nature to keep shut and wilt

PAD/023 – empty

| Sheree

The last thing I emptied was my heart

I emptied my heart of lies and shame.

Took out the crammed spaces and rot/

carried them all out to the trash.

It was decluttering to the max of my heart/ of my love – for others/ for myself

I tell, you I haven’t felt better. Heart beating full-blood-red.

Like a new lamb to the slaughter, I’m showing up in my day to day/ jumping/

Springing/ heart open and bleeding.

PAD/022- You have a choice

| Sheree

You have a choice.

Like the dandelion

flowering within the edge

of a verge or between pavement slabs,

you have a choice.

Arousal. Finding joy

in life, is not something

someone else can give to you.

You must take it.

Like breathing.

Like the tulips coming

up for air, right here. Right now.

You have a choice.

An electric current swirling

always, through you.

Between you and the cherry blossom

bursting into pink glory.

To live from this bounty,

you have a choice.

PAD/019 – i am becoming my mother

| Sheree

Commentary: years ago I wrote a poem titled ‘ i am becoming my mother’. I think it’s in my first full collection Family Album, Flambard Press 2011.

A few weeks ago while attending one of my late night across the Atlantic poetry group workshops, I had an inkling to revisit this poem with the intention of bringing it up to date. To try and incorporate all the ‘Sherees’ that have developed, spored since the first poem, since my mum’s death and teachings have passed into decades gone by.

So I created this piece. Same title but definitely more expansive.

i am becoming my mother

Dehumanising the Black woman. Mammy, Jezebel, Sapphire, Bitch.

The black woman is seen as one dimensional; the mule of the world, carrying the heavy burden of mothering all others except her own.

Her own children are lost; lost to the auction block, the ocean, the noose.

A Black woman is a source of strength and love. Passing on power as well as pain.

Her body carries stories, carries histories, carries an archive.

as a black woman,

resting deep within the meadow,

held in softness,

grass tickling shins,

dress billowing about

like blossom,

is a political act.

PAD/ 017 – for god’s sake, we must stop this coloured invasion

| Sheree
Stop the Coloured Invasion Protest Meeting, Trafalgar Square, London, 1959. Taken from Black Britain: A Photographic History, Ed’s. Stuart Hall and Paul Gilroy

a white banner shifts against Nelson’s Column, ‘KEEP BRITAIN WHITE.’

a bright white suspension of unwelcome and hate

ladies and gentlemen with heads turned up as if taking direction from God himself, listen to the message

from a man, on the platform, with Union Jack legs

as if whiteness and rightness runs through him like quickening sap/

the threat is real murmurs through the crowd/ a gathering searching for answers to stop the invasion

let me enter the scene/ from the extreme right/

let me mingle at the back/ near the man in a flat cap

let me feel the heat of the air/

let me sense the crackle of fear in their white, wholesome bodies

my body would be one of those coloured they want to stop

my body would be one of those aliens they want to exterminate

but what they don’t care to know is that this body belongs to a love evangelist

who’s at pains to show them how love can save us all

if only they’d part their ways and let me through

PAD/011 – Carnival, 1976

| Sheree

Each August Bank Holiday weekend,

Notting Hill’s West Indian community 

celebrates Caribbean culture. Calypso.

Crates of records. Stacks of speakers. 

Reggae, ska, groove, and samba 

vibrations of Carnival.

Mid parade, sweaty bodies wining

bodies growing, red stripe flowing. 

Pure joy seen as suspicious. 

The boys in blue are sent in, in force.

Black batons meet black arms, legs and heads.

Slicing through bodies like cutlass through cane. 

Cutdown revellers hauled into hospital 

or prison cells. Carnival; a unique

expression of love of self, freedom 

and resistance. Therefore it’s spirit

has to be demonised and destroyed.