Bring a Friend, and a poem to start the year

(Priscilla and me, July 2023)

Friends,

First, there’s only a couple days left to sign up to join me and Priscilla Washington for The Front Burner, an online generative writing group. We’re offering a special that if you bring a friend, one of you gets 1/2 off!

This will be a very sweet supportive space, with prompts for writing Monday-Friday, and a space to share your writing as you choose. I’d love to have you join us. Please reach out with any questions to frontburnercommunity@gmail.com and there’s lots more info here at the sign up.

I’ll be graduating with my MFA in poetry from Warren Wilson in just a few days (!!!) and here’s a poem I love from Jane Hirschfield to start your year off.

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Counting, This New Year’s Morning, What Powers Yet Remain To Me

The world asks, as it asks daily:
And what can you make, can you do, to change my deep-broken, fractured?

I count, this first day of another year, what remains.
I have a mountain, a kitchen, two hands.

Can admire with two eyes the mountain,
actual, recalcitrant, shuffling its pebbles, sheltering foxes and beetles.

Can make black-eyed peas and collards.
Can make, from last year’s late-ripening persimmons, a pudding.

Can climb a stepladder, change the bulb in a track light.

For four years, I woke each day first to the mountain,
then to the question.

The feet of the new sufferings followed the feet of the old,
and still they surprised.

I brought salt, brought oil, to the question. Brought sweet tea,
brought postcards and stamps. For four years, each day, something.

Stone did not become apple. War did not become peace.
Yet joy still stays joy. Sequins stay sequins. Words still bespangle, bewilder.

Today, I woke without answer.

The day answers, unpockets a thought from a friend

don’t despair of this falling world, not yet

didn’t it give you the asking