Sharing My Practice – 003
poetry
Learning Vulnerability
Tell us about your first day at something — school, work, as a parent, etc.
After Krista O’Reilly-Davi-Digui
Learning to move from head to heart,
moving into greater vulnerability,
everyday feels like the first day.
There is the risk of doing or saying
the wrong thing. Hurting others
as I learn to express myself,
what I want, what I need
makes those close uncomfortable.
And yet,
as I step deeper into fugitivity,
linger in the edges, skin prickly
with expansion. I trust.
Take self-authority and do not hide
from this becoming, this vulnerability.
Offering myself and others grace
and compassion, I walk on, slow,
with heart in hand.
Sharing some words on substack
I haven’t looked back since I left mailchimp and took Living Wild Studios Notes over to substack. To send out a missive, a newsletter, or even just a hello is so much more straightforward and simple. It makes the task less arduous and much more enjoyable.
So I’ve just spent some time today creating the last note of the year for subscribers. And I added in an audio reading of it too, because I can.
It’s just me musing about the loss of words this year and then finding them again through listening outdoors and within. Go on over there and check it out. Warning: poetry included too!
And sign up as a subscriber if you fancy too. You’ll be more than welcome.
Not quite ready yet
I’ve been receiving emails from newsletters that I subscribe to detailing end of year round ups and reflections. And I’m not sure I’m ready yet to step into that energy. I’m still living the year in front of me now – day by day. To let me just linger in the moments. Linger in the awareness of time passing. Winter’s here and the geese are getting fat an all that. But even in these times of worry, brutality and violence, let us to a moment to breathe and give thanks.
I only saw his shine once it was too late to feel it
In the dream, he comes back to me, whole and young.
He was always young in my eyes. When I used to ask him at each birthday how old he was, Daddy would answer, 45.
He was always 45 in all the years I knew him. All the years I was living, he was dying.
In the replaying of images, I play it differently.
I keep my distance until he asks for me to bring his slippers or newspaper. I offer them with bowed head. I don’t throw them at him as I used to. Escaping his rage, escaping the beats.
I keep my distance, but I want to be close to him. To hold him. To feel his love for me. Then and now, still needed after so many years gone.
To serve, he brought me up, to serve. Instead of getting the vacuum clearer out, he had us on the floor picking up the bits of fluff and crumbs. To hear his pride at a job well done was enough.
When I enter the chapel of rest, it’s like I’m floating on air, light as the flowing curtains concealing a prize. I see him now, as then …
he‘a surrounded by gold satin, his mahogany black skin shines, relaxed and unlined, sea-black lips wave-curled and still.
He looks younger than 45. Even though the plaque on the coffin lid reads 1920 -1981 – he was 61. And the time he was dying. I was living.
Poem – An Act of Faith
Isn’t that what a poem is?
Elizabeth Acevedo
A lantern glowing in the dark.
Just as dusk is falling, I walk. Affected by the elements,
head in pain from the wind, I force myself out into the dim light,
believing moving my legs will strengthen my heart.
Motherly care, higher forces in radio silence. Walk
The moon pale blue and silent. But still there. Always.
Like the ancestors, guiding. Allowing me to find my own way. Tonight.
To falter, make mistakes and loop back. Remaining open.
Trusting these windows of silence as still inspiration.
Hope holds optimism. Optimism holds joy.
The touch of joy, fine-grained dark jasper, I search for along the path.
This spiritual path of putting pen to page, again and again.
Like one foot in front of another. An act of faith.
Black Aliveness
“We are not the idea of us, not even the idea that we hold of us. We are us, multiple and varied, becoming. The heterogeneity of us. Blackness in a Black world is everything, which means that it gets to be freed from being any one thing. We are ordinary beauty, Black people, and beauty must be allowed to do its beautiful work.” Kevin Quashie describes in Black Aliveness, or, A Black Poetics of Being.
Confessional POetry Course
(Speaking about Robert Lowell’s poetry) “Lowell removes the mask. His speaker is unequivocally himself, and it is hard not to think of Life Studies as a series of personal confidences, rather shameful, that one is honor-bound not to reveal.”
M. L. Rosenthal’s article “Poetry as Confession.”
I’m taking a four week confessional poetry course with midnight & indigo. Founded in 2018, midnight & indigo is a small publisher and literary journal that provides a space for Black women writers to share their narratives with the world.
Tw weeks in and I’m loving the course, Tell Me Something Real: How to Write Confessional Poetry. Not only is the tutor, Schyler Butler knowledgeable, and thorough providing great examples for poetry within this genre all from Black women, but the group of writers signed up for the course bring it every week with their insight and feelings around each poem we read and discuss.
And then we get to trial out what we’ve learnt through these close writings within our own writing, as the sessions finishes with time to write a first draft of a poem and then share it with the group. I’m enjoying what I’m coming up with after being inspired. Because in all honesty, from time I’ve been a confessional poet but have never smashed the term on it.
Confessional poetry in essence can be distilled to 4 main components.
- Be of an intimate subject matter.
- Use the first person.
- Be autobiographical or seen/ appear to be.
- Use skilled craftsmanship.
I’m working on a new body of work now. So still in the draft stage but I’ll share a poem from time here, as evidence of my appreciation and dance with this form of poetry.
White Women
Within my family, there are white women.
White women who married black men. I forget,
neglect the fact that their blood flows through mine.
Trace the past, a sea of faceless white is mine.
The black men forefront, a mist of women
behind. Their names, I don’t know or forget.
They are the enigma, shadows. Forget
the cleaning and cooking, their duty and mine,
they went against the grain, steadfast women.
In the corner of the frame, you white women
are not forgotten. Your spirit is mine.
Family Album, 2011
I’m thinking of creating a fungi zine …
dark morels
clustering
against roots
of ash trees
moist
in gathering dark
night air leaning
into a textured silence
well-earned through
a receding wall of trees
I have a little series of poems inspired by fungi: mushrooms, toadstools and the like.
I’ve always enjoyed looking at pictures of fungi. I’d draw them from books and colour then in with coloured pencils. I started a collection of them, when a child. In real life, I’m not too sure, I like fungi up close. I think something the way they feel puts me off. And that they are alive!
Also the idea of spores frighten me. Obviously, the fear comes from a lack of understanding and knowledge about them.
What I do know is that they are vital to life. And that whole underground system they have going on of passing nutrients and messages between plants and ecosystems and other organisms is truly remarkable. And has to be respected.
Anyway, I was thinking of pulling these fungi poems together into a mushroom zine. I do love my zines. What do you think?
Of course I have to find the time to create it. But now I’ve stated it here, it lends some kind of accountability to completing the task.
Anyway, above is a brief extract from one of the poems. I think I have about 5 or 6 of them. So I’ll keep working on them and start thinking of some cool design to go with them.
Of course being here now, saying all this, is me thinking out loud. Making some kind of commitment to a dream and making steps to seeing it through.
I’l share some more of the poem in the next post.
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