HAIKU
Loved
Unconditional love
Father you have won my heart
Extravagant love
Sacred Garden
The scent of boxwoods
Pungent fragrance calls to me
I am on retreat
Son of My Heart
Johnathan my son
Courageous dragon slayer
Firstborn of my heart
Soul Mate
Gift of love to me
So brief our life together
Always in my heart
Writing Exercise
Write a page about a
road or a room.
Rabbit Road
I don’t remember how to get to Rabbit Road, but I recall
being on it. Dense brush and kudzu vines line one side; open cotton fields on
the other. Under the cover of overgrown trees about halfway down the road is a
tumbledown shack. Gray warped boards form a tilted porch and holes mark the
spots where door and windows hung. Pull off the road and join me, as I push
aside briars and vines and approach the house.
This is where my father-in-law grew up. He lives here with
his grandmother and uncles. If you look closely you might find old brown
bottles, some still whole, that once held the moonshine distilled by his
family. We collect a couple of bottles as keepsakes and head back to the car.
Why’s it called rabbit
road, Daddy, my son asks.
Because Grandpa and
his uncles used to hunt and eat the plentiful rabbits. And, because when the
law came looking, they hid away like rabbits.
We continued down the sun-filled country road with images of
scurrying bunnies and men in our heads. The road brings us out to the highway.
Write a poem from the
previous description:
Rabbit Road
Rural south
Just-picked cotton fields
Pines covered in kudzu
Here lies history
Falling down
Gray shack
Holes for doors and windows
Here’s where grandpa grew up
Brown bottles
Mostly broken
Once held moonshine whiskey
Rabbits thrived
Men survived
In poverty and want
It’s just a road
Rural south
Here lies history
Revise the Poem
Rabbit Road
It’s a narrow country road
Like hundreds of others in the rural south
Rows of cotton to the horizon
And pine trees draped in kudzu
Here lies history
Halfway down the road
Overgrown with vines and time
Remnants of a sharecropper shack
Gaping holes where door and windows hung
Sagging and weathered gray
What was a porch
Now angles toward the ground
Brown and broken glass
Relics of moonshine
To keep food on the table
To dull the constant ache of poverty
Then we’re back on the road
Rabbit Road…
Here lies history.
Writing Exercise
(Timed writings without lifting the pen from the paper.)
1. Sometimes I wish…
…I didn’t have so many voices in my head, telling me why I can’t
do something or why I should or shouldn’t say something. Sometimes I wish I
would just shut up and stop thinking I always have to say something, even to my
…
2. I remember…
…my mother’s hands; the veins stood out. I used to trace
them with my fingers when I sat beside her in church. Now I have veins like her
and she is sitting in a nursing home with her hands folded in her lap—unable to
talk, but I still remember her hands and now I see my own hands.
3. Outrageously
Creative
Five Unanswerable Questions:
1.
Where do emails go when you hit send and before
the recipient receives?
2.
Why does it seem that people of color experience
such a disproportionate amount of the world’s pain?
3.
Why do some people die of heart
disease—instantly, and some people have life-saving surgery, just in time?
4.
Why do cats seem to be attracted to people who
don’t particularly care for animals?
5.
Will I get to travel in heaven?
Four Details That I Noticed From This Day:
1.
Morning coffee
2.
Scent of the boxwoods
3.
Hugging my housemate
4.
Greeting from the gentleman
Five Things For Which I Am Grateful:
1.
Family
2.
Friends
3.
The ocean
4.
God’s unconditional love
5.
Gifts in nature
Select 2 questions, 2 details, and 1 grateful. Write a
paragraph.
Where do emails go when you hit send and before the
recipient receives it? I pondered this over my morning coffee, and I considered
asking the gentleman who greeted me on arrival at the retreat. Instead, I sat
in my room and thought about God’s unconditional love and how I hoped that His
love would include allowing me to travel in heaven, since it doesn’t seem as if
I’ll get to see much of the world in this lifetime. Maybe I’ll be like an
email, somewhere between sender and recipient.
Writing Exercise
Write a thank you to a writer, whose book or writings changed your life.
Sarah Miles, Take this Bread
Dear Sarah,
Several summers ago at the cabin, I read your book, Take This Bread. I want you to know how
it changed my life. I have always looked at communion as a sort of closed
ritual for the few. Your story not only changed how I view the Lord’s Supper,
as a feast open to all, but how I view eating a meal as well. When I sit down
to eat with my children, I look at them, and with open eyes, taking in their loveliness, I thank God for
the privilege of sharing sustenance with them. When I eat with friends, I look
in their eyes and thank God for them and the gift of their friendship. When I
watch my 90-year-old mother raise a shaking spoon to her mouth, my heart is
filled with love and gratitude for the life she gave me and the meals she so
lovingly prepared all those years.
When I finished your book at the cabin, we drug the old
picnic table down by the lake to eat our dinner. Wounded and real, we sat down
to eat. I could hardly breathe as we blessed our food and ate together.
Thank you for changing this ordinary experience into sacred.
Nancy
Following are several poems that I wrote while at the Writer's Retreat. They were not assignments...just inspired by time and place.
Fall Moment
It’s like a painting with leaves falling
Almost magical
Like a scene from Harry Potter
Beauty that makes me want to draw back
and enter at the same time
I can’t take a picture
because if I leave to get my camera
it won’t be the same when I return
It’s a moment for my memory only
I’m Awake!
My shower sucked!
Conserving water…I know
But the fine head
Forced needles
Into my unturned face
First icy then scalding
Torturous acupuncture
Not to mention
The mist that floated
Down toward
My legs and lower regions
How to rinse off
Suds with clouds
Ugh!
Bugs Life
Lady bugs are sort of cute
But in limited numbers
Not in the hordes that are
crawling up and down the
inside of the arch
where I pulled my chair
up to read.
How can I relax
when there’s a whole
community of bugs
doing the work of
bug life
all around me?
Yep. Here comes one
right now
crawling up the arm
of the Adirondack chair
right over my phone.
Relax.
Breathe.
They don’t bite
… do they?
