Oppositions— the Mug and the Dimple for Baby Francis What is the opposite of day? Night Of light? Dark Of love? Hate What is the opposite of vacuum cleaner? Leafblower What is the opposite of moss on a sidewalk? What is the opposite of a belly laugh...
This one started as a writing prompt of the ‘describe an everyday process of making something’ sort. But then my mind got stuck on an idea I’d had right as I was starting to make dinner and it became…. something else. But...
“Odysseus was melting into tears; his cheeks were wet with weeping, as a woman weeps, as she falls to wrap her arms around her husband, fallen fighting for his home and children. She is watching as he gasps and dies. She shrieks, a clear high wail...
Don’t count your chickens… the saying goes But I’m not counting, I’m imagining flocks of bids soaring, wheeling, roosting in the tops of the tallest pine trees. Who said anything about chickens, anyway? I’m dreaming murders of crows...
Deirdre Mundy is musing about Penelope and the shroud of Laertes: ” I started wondering about the economic value of labor that was destroyed by Penelope’s nightly unweaving on her loom.” And she shared a couple of links, which I also...
Reading Notes January 2019 I joined two online reading groups and started reading Dostoevsky’s Brothers Karamazov and Trollope’s Can You Forgive Her? Ambitious? Yes. Foolishly so? Perhaps. Only time will tell. I abandoned The Bear and the...
Among my pile of library books on poetry is one called The Practice of Poetry: Writing Exercises from Poets Who Teach edited by Robin Behn and Chase Twichell. Today I jumped in to the first exercise: Try to recall a very early experience you had of...
Three things that caught my eye in today’s Morning Prayer. 1. “The Lord delights in his people” (antiphon, Morning Prayer, Sunday Week 1 of Lent) God is not angry, he is not sad, he is not fed up with us, or tolerating us. The Lord delights. The...
“Difficulty itself may be a path toward concentration— expended effort weaves us into a task, and successful engagement, however laborious, becomes also a labor of love. The work of writing brings replenishment even to the writer dealing with...
I will put Chaos into fourteen lines And keep him there; and let him thence escape If he be lucky; let him twist, and ape Flood, fire, and demon — his adroit designs Will strain to nothing in the strict confines Of this sweet order, where, in...
