Tag: poetry workshop

Soul Sunday

Happy Father’s Day!! I am blessed by the men in my life. As a woman, I understand that not everyone can say that, so I am utterly and completely grateful. New readers, Sundays are devoted to poetry. On Sundays, I either write a poem or share a poem written by someone else and I strongly encourage you to add your poems in my Comments section. I consider Sundays to be a poetry workshop day for us. There is no judgment, just creative wordplay and word flow. Please see previous Sunday posts for more poetry to feed your soul.

To My Husband and the Father of My Children

When I fell in love with you

We were just kids ourselves.

Now our own children are mostly grown.

Yet . . . .

With all of your accomplishments,

With all of your roguish competitiveness,

With all of your dreams and dedication,

There was never, ever a doubt in my mind,

That our family was the heart of it all, for you.

Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

Soul Sunday

Good morning, friends. It’s a lovely sunny Sunday morning here which is so refreshing because we have had quite a bit of rain here lately. It makes me feel peaceful and hopeful. New readers, Sundays are devoted to poetry here at Adulting – Second Half. On Sundays, I either share a poem I have written or I share a poem written by someone else. Please share your poetry with me and other readers, in the Comments section. Today’s poem is from a book of poetry by Kevin Anderson. I love his poetry because it follows the same format of adding to and thus, cleverly changing an original thought or idea, to something more profound. This poem is from the book Now is Where God Lives.

Don’t talk about great souls.

Don’t talk about great souls – become one!

Don’t talk about great souls.

Become one

with all.

Don’t talk about great souls.

Become one

with all

great souls who have embodied the Great Soul.

Soul Sunday

It is poetry workshop day, here at Adulting – Second Half. Yesterday was a day of highs and lows. I was thrilled with the successful launch of the space shuttle! Such a nerve-wracking yet exciting, prideful event to watch! Still, my heart felt very heavy with all of the pain our country is going through with these horrible, unjustified killings. I wrote today’s poem, yesterday, from a very emotional place. Please fill my Comments with your poems. It is great release.

For the Love of our Sons

To my sisters who are “mamas” of big, strong, handsome, young black men,

We share the “mama” part, we mamas of sons, but your burdens are greater than mine.

You and I worry about our boys’ health, and opportunities and decisions and loves,

But you also worry that the people who are supposed to protect our boys, might instead

Destroy them.

You have to teach your boys a lesson, I would never even conceive of,

You must teach your sons that they are often considered guilty suspects by their very appearance, and you must teach your sons to be wary of the people who I have casually taught my sons to mostly trust.

Dear mama, my sister in motherhood, my heart aches for you. Being a mother is such a vulnerable position to be in, from the minute we feel our babies growing inside of us,

we love them intensely . . . with everything we have.

You and I are no different in that regard. I know this with my whole, bare heart. Your heart beats for your children, as my heart beats for mine. Do our unveiled hearts look very much the same? I imagine that they do. Love is love.

A mother’s heart brims with Love. An overflowing Love is what a mother’s heart is made of.

But I have less worry, less burden than which you must carry with you every day.

You hold yourself with such dignity and pride and strength and a serene knowing-ness, which I so admire,

Yet I know that I could probably never, ever replicate your beautiful countenance.

Mostly because I’ve never had to try.

You must need that beautiful, intense, impenetrable armor of yours, to shield your heart. But honestly, how much distress can a heart hold before it breaks and shatters and bursts, the lovely, steely container that holds it?

I don’t carry your burdens. I understand that. I know that neither of us should have to carry anything. Our hearts should be light of load, as we carry out the request of the Universe, to nurture our precious sons into manhood.

I don’t carry your burdens. I can never fully understand. I won’t disrespect you, by pretending I know how you feel.

But I can offer you my heart and my hand and my arms to rest in. I can offer you my prayers. I can offer you my careful consideration in all of the choices that I make and the lessons I impart, which help to form this Life which we are all living in. Together.

We are co-creating this world together, all of us, and I want all of our sons to experience the complete fullness that their lives have to offer. This is what uplifts the world. When your son benefits, so does mine. When your heart is light, so is mine.

When your daughters have baby sons, I want your daughters to feel as nonchalant as I do, when teaching her boys about authority figures. I want that lesson to be a minor footnote and not of much concern. I want the beautiful wonderment of life to be the focus of her teachings. Mamas shouldn’t have to teach fear and defensiveness and undue submissiveness to their beloved children.

This outpouring is my long way of saying, please don’t think that I don’t care. I do care. I care very much. I want this sadness, despair and anger and travesty to end. I want this racism to be over now. I want all of our children to experience a life free of racism. I want racism to be thing of dusty history books, an account that is so shocking to our grandchildren, that they can barely comprehend how these injustices existed.

Dear sister in motherhood,

Tell me what I can do to help unload the burden of your pain.

Sincerely signed, a mama of big, strong, handsome, young white men

Soul Sunday

Hi friends. Welcome to Soul Sunday. My regular readers know and understand that Sundays are dedicated to poetry here at Adulting – Second Half. I like to call it a poetry workshop. Most of the time, I write a poem or I reprint another author’s poem which has moved me. I strongly encourage my readers to share your own poetry in my Comments section. We don’t critique. We just share and enjoy, each other’s intriguing word play.

I was feeling a little abstract with today’s poem that I wrote. Here is my sharing for today. Please enjoy it and have a peaceful, beautiful day!

Epiphany

It appears that your true self has been leaking out of you, your whole life

But you never noticed the clues.

The power and the majesty and the synchronicities have left a trail

Of obvious and tantalizing bread crumbs

But you weren’t hungry enough to follow them, nor to realize,

that the crumbs created the clear pathway, to what you were always seeking.

Perhaps you were too distracted or perhaps you didn’t realize that the very diversions themselves,

Were actually what tied everything together into a fascinating, obvious conclusion.

You were leaving yourself your own hints, but you never knew that they applied,

to the greatest, most intriguing mystery of your life . . . . yourself.

Sunday Soul

Here’s some fun for you to do really quick:

Go to Google. Type Wizard of Oz. Click the red slippers. Click the tornado. You’re welcome!

Did you have fun with that? Here’s some more fun. Sundays are devoted to poetry here at Adulting – Second Half. On Sundays, I publish a poem that I have written or that someone else has written and I strongly encourage you to publish your own poems in the Comments section. This is not a critique session, it’s free-form flowing of words. Honestly friends, today the poetry just isn’t flowing for me, but I found this cute poem. I think that it’s funny. Sorry, I don’t know who to attribute it to, because the poet definitely deserves some kudos for bringing smiles to faces:

I Wish I Were A Glow Worm | Words, Quotes, Funny quotes

If you want to see a great attempt of my poetry skills, please see previous Sunday posts! Enjoy some sunshine today, friends! The sunshine is the magic medicine. There’s a reason why we call it “Sun” day!

Sunday Soul

Hi readers. I’m terribly sorry to be late posting today. Sundays are a big readership day for me and I appreciate that fact. I think people like poetry more than they pretend to like it. I’m late because I got myself involved in a “little” painting job this weekend. I decided to paint some window panes. The job seemed simple and painless, enough. Ha! I decided to complete the finishing touches this morning before the hot Florida sun baked even more dark bronze-y paint into my skin. I look like a leopard.

New readers, Sundays are devoted to poetry here at Adulting – Second Half. Poetry is the unedited, free-flowing sounds of our souls. I already got my creative juices out by painting this morning, so I am going to reprint a poem today, that you may have seen already. The poem has gone viral and many believed that it was written by an author during the 1919 Pandemic. Alas, this is not true. It was actually written in March of 2020 by a chaplain from Wisconsin named Kitty O’Meara. It is untitled and it is beautiful. Please add your poems (your writings or someone else’s writings) to the Comments section. Here is the lovely words of a very much alive, Kitty O’Meara:

By Kitty O’Meara
And the people stayed home.
And read books, and listened, and rested,
and exercised, and made art, and played games,
and learned new ways of being, and were still.
And listened more deeply.
Some meditated, some prayed, some danced.
Some met their shadows.
And the people began to think differently.
And the people healed.
And, in the absence of people living in ignorant,
dangerous, mindless, and heartless ways,
the earth began to heal.
And when the danger passed, and the people joined together again,
they grieved their losses, and made new choices, and dreamed new images,
and created new ways to live and heal the earth fully,
as they had been healed.

Soul Sunday

“I should like, if I could, to leave a humble gift – a bit of chaste prose that had caught up some noble moods.” – Max Ehrmann

So yesterday I was going through some old books of mine and I found a lovely poem by the heralded author and poet, Max Ehrmann. This is an old poem. Ehrmann wrote it in 1927 and its worldwide popularity started around the 1950s, years after Ehrmann’s death. The poem is called Desiderata which is Latin for “things that are yearned for.” As my regular readers know, Sundays are devoted to poetry here at Adulting – Second Half. Typically, I write a poem, or I find a poem by someone else that I want to share. I ask that you share your poetry in the Comments section. This is not a critique session. This is a safe outpouring of our feelings in the form of words. Please share. Your poems are precious gifts to yourself and to us. Today, my offering is just to share Desiderata by Max Ehrmann because the poem holds particular poignancy in times like these, especially.

Desiderata | Desiderata poem, Desiderata, Words

Soul Sunday

Good morning, friends and readers. I slept in this morning. I had a really good night’s sleep and I woke into a morning that simply could not be prettier. So I spent a lot of time in the back yard with our dogs, and all the while, nature lovingly surrounded us with its incredible, synchronistic sights and sounds. I think that I was experiencing poetry in that moment, with no words, yet it was pure poetry. I think a gift that we all have gotten from this quarantine experience is the gift of more compassion for ourselves. We have been given more “guilt-free” time; this time is free of the judge-y “shoulds”. Why not sleep in? Why not lull around in nature? Why not have an empty calendar open to some spontaneity? It’s like quarantine has given us permission to do things that maybe we could have been doing all along, but we had some kind of irrational judgment that there were better uses of our time.

New readers, Sundays are poetry workshop days. On Sundays, I typically share a poem that I have written and I strongly encourage you to share your poems in my Comments section. This is creative free-flow. I would never allow any negativity in this beautiful, calming Sunday space, so please, please share your profound souls with us. Poetry connects us like not other form, in the written world. It is word music. Today, honestly, my own creative juices aren’t singing, but I have two poems that I will share with you that came to my attention this week. The first poem is by the great author, Kelly Corrigan, and the second poem is a beautiful offering from my friend and poet, Walberto Campos. Enjoy!

To Alessandro

by Kelly Corrigan


I should haven’t been standing so close
this morning at the Safeway.
I thought she was about to leave–
the woman with the good haircut and fancy bag,
her mounds of kale and yogurt and nuts,
enough for another apocalyptic week.

But then the machine betrayed her.
She swiped and inserted and stood back.
She reapproached.
She said “This doesn’t make sense,
I don’t know why this isn’t working,
I just used this card last night.”
Her hands were shaking.
Then Alessandro, benevolent ruler of Safeway line 5, said
“Take your time.
It’s not your fault.
There’s no rush.”

There was though.
There were 11 carts behind me in the pet food aisle and
23 more down the water and sports drink aisle.
People leaning back against crates of Gatorade
shifting from foot to foot
scrolling then staring then
leaning around each other to see what the hold up was.

We were looking to Alessandro and his $11-an-hour army
running distribution and provisions for a nation unnerved:
the twenty-two-year-old at Target wiping down the door
handles and carts,
the thirty-nine-year-old at the farmer’s market who’d rather
be home with her jumpy children, her husband who just lost his job at the corner bistro,
The fifty-five-year-old at CVS who smiles behind his mask as
he hands over your asthma inhaler or anti-anxiety
medication.

In Alessandro’s army,
every soldier seems ready to serve
standing at attention,
saying the thing we most need to hear:
“Take your time,
Its not your fault,
There’s no rush.”

Many blessings to you today, my friends! Enjoy a guilt-free Sunday. Follow your whims!

Soul Sunday

Happy Birthday, to my wonderful eldest son! You made parenting so amazing and fulfilling, that we went on to have three more awesome children. I love you. I am proud of you. It’s killing me that you are so far away from me, but you’re doing great, enjoying your own company, during this pandemic. I can’t blame you. You are a joy to be with and to talk to and to gather good energy from, by you, just being you. You are one of the most authentic people I have ever known. You are the best company! Don’t ever change. Here’s a quote that I know that you will like:

“Wanting to be someone else is a waste of the person you are.” – Kurt Cobain

So, my regular readers know that Sundays are poetry workshop days, here at Adulting – Second Half. On Sundays, I typically share a poem that I have written and I ask you to do the same in the Comments section. Today, I was inspired by something my husband read in the Wall Street Journal. Here are a couple of haikus, published in this weekend’s WSJ, by Nishant Choksi, describing/depicting our quarantine life: (Haikus are three lines, 5 syllables, 7 syllables, 5 syllables)

Can’t work with children

Clinging to my every limb

I am a plaything!

________________________________________________________________________________________

I have measured out

This help-desk call in Cheez-its

Fifteen and counting

________________________________________________________________________________________

All day on the phone

Convincing Boomer parents

To please, please stay home

________________________________________________________________________________________

Here’s my stab at it:

________________________________________________________________________________________

Keeping up with news

Is exhausting and scary

But I just can’t stop

________________________________________________________________________________________

Home Sweet Home, they say

And that’s generally true

Until you are stuck

________________________________________________________________________________________

Try some haiku poems of your own, friends! They are fun! Take care. I am wishing you peace, health and sanity. (I’ve had a lot of people wishing us sanity, lately. I’m not going to take it personally. 😉 )

Soul Sunday

It struck me the other day that this is probably the first time in my life when I have actually felt more vulnerable due to my age. I’m approaching 50. This “dawning” was a middle age turning point for me. It was one of those awakening moments that reminded me that I really am headed into the autumn of my life. My heart goes out to you all who are in your 60s and beyond. It must be terrifying, at times, concerning the coronavirus. I feel for you.

Sundays are devoted to poetry here at Adulting – Second Half. Please publish your poems in my Comments section. This is a poetry workshop, where we should all feel safe to share, our free flow of thoughts. Here’s my poem for the day:

The Trick

Who knew that we were all part of a fantastic illusion?

We were the white rabbits and the silk scarves,

in a grand sleight of the hand.

We thought that we were in on the trick,

Winking, knowing how the “magic” works.

We, as lovely assistants, sometimes smirked at the Magician,

Sneered at the fools in the audience,

Only to be brought to our knees,

By a horrific force, too tiny to even be seen.

Now we are all in this together,

Humbled by the unknown,

No longer wishing to just be entertained,

No longer full of pride and disdain,

Just praying for the real magic to fix this all,

In order for us to be wholly healed,

Sewing together all of our parts that have been sawed apart,

And for the trick to be over, so that the real magic can begin . . .