Summer of Writing

This summer has been all about writing for me.  I spent a month as one of the tutors for the fourth and fifth grade students Youth Writing Festival and this past week, I spent a week on my own writing as I took a class connecting Process Theology and the creative process.  It was a great class with a lot of depth.  I wanted to share this creativity with all of you in the form of the poetry we wrote this week.  None of these are fully finished, but I really enjoyed the process and wanted to share it with you as my friends and family.  Enjoy, but don't take as a complete explanation of my life and ideas.  We are all still a work in progress, or... process!

The first poem comes from an exercise where we had to rhyme/ slant rhyme with the words on a piece of paper and then pass for the next person.  After a few times around, we had to use all the words on the sheet to make a poem, here is my abstract creation...

Dream swimming

Pie in the sky

Defy the Shabbat

Trimming the tree

Dream swimming the sleep drought

Deus Machina was the shout

Drumming and jumping

The dance is the cry!

Deus Crapina has come

Deify the shallot!


This next piece comes from an exercise where we had to pick out words that stuck out for us in each of our readings.  For that day, our readings pulled from Catherine Keller's On the Mystery to  Audre Lorde and a reflection from Neitzsche.  It was rather ecclectic!

Collective

In our ordinary lives

The miracle occurs

The child is born

The woman suffers

Unfamiliar lives become

Pre-figured we expect the worl

simple, practical, perceiveable

But.

Spiritually dry

Organic reality steps in

Non logical

A fragmentary panorama

Frustration

Our mnemonic device of the sacred has stopped working

Open to the luminous darkness

Wake in the night to see the Etherial angel

Are we awake or still dreaming?

Put it on paper

create         destroy                transform.

The impossible happens

The genesis collective is yours

This next one comes from an exercise of imagining ourselves as an inanimate object.  I still think this is my favorite of the week.

I am the coin in your pocket

Warmed by the body, held close against the skin.

On my own I am of small value,

Together we grow, we jingle, we jangle, we add together.

Taking on the scent of the coffee shop

Where I am spent. Faintness of espresso.

Touched to the lips for luck

Taste of the not-quite-something-ness lingers

Hints of chapstick washes over.

The grooves of my side rolled down your nose

I can feel your freckles.

Transferred from hand to hand, purchase to purchase

I am always.  I will  be always.

My power is not my value, my payment ability

My power is in the future imagination.

What will I buy tomorrow, 20 years from now?

On some future day, to be found

                Cold on the sidewalk.

I will be picked up again and become

The coin in your pocket

Warmed by the body, held close against the skin.

This last one was very structured going in.  We had to use a nesting rhyme at the end of each triplet and needed to write 5 triplets that told a story.  I think this one out of all of them, is one that could be rewritten every day and get a new idea to come out.  Feel free to try this exercise yourselves!  If you don't know what a nesting rhyme is, you will soon as you continue to read.

Discord

When you and I become we, it is as one community

It is not alone, yet as one being, a unit

With lives to live and paths to tread, we are a knotted tie.

It is is hard and discordant, this process of consternation

Each side makes its case, over and against, stern

Making the many into one is rough, this making of a nation.

Over time we break and bond again, our paths are the passages

Toward truth.  In and out of rightness we seek sages

When found, we find their infinite wisdom to sag.

The truth dripping form sugar coated lips, easy to swallow

But once there, hard to hold down.  In failure, we wallow

The real truth that is real is that we must give space, allow

Between the now and the future, there is much we must restrain

Rules and laws, frustrating and confining, are only meant to train

So that we can learn to live, rolling justice down like rain

I'd love some feedback!