Thirty Thanks with Sarah Donovan, April 30, 2024
Today was a day to say goodbye until June and write a poetic response to this month of writing poems. I stumbled around for a while, and then I wrote a silly limerick.
Earlier attempts:
Pencil and paper
Dig out the broken rubble
Sing: I am Poet
I empty to become full
Poems pour onto paper
A poem doesn’t know my name.
It was composed time ago
and away from here
But that poem
whispers from the ages
From the pages
And finds its way
Swirling
Dreaming
Loving
Changing
Into my life
Today.
Me By Myself
After Eloise Greenfield and Katalyn
When I’m by myself
And I close my eyes
I’m content
I’m unbent
I want more
I’m a bore
I’m full of ambition
but short an ignition
I’m focused, but hazy
I’m the wind, I’m a daisy
I’m whatever I want to be
An anything I care to be
And when I open my eyes
What I care to be
Is me
That year
I spent hanging out
with boys every recess,
I was one of two girls
“allowed” to play baseball
in the sixth grade lunch recess league.
Every day I wore
the same rag tag jeans
with patches on the knees.
When I went to our larger junior high school,
I decided to embrace my femininity.
I thought I had made
changes in my appearance,
that summer I started
growing my hair out. I
bought new girl clothes
and wore some that first day
of seventh grade.
But as Mrs. Sykes
called out my name
during roll call,
I came forward
to get whatever
she was passing out.
She said,
“No, this is a girl.”
Or something similar.
I said, “That’s me.”
Or something similar.
In a better world,
she would have known
my pronouns.
Found from “Bushwick Library,” in When We Made It, novel in verse, by Elisabet Velasquez.
every Saturday
leaves us at the library
no time limit
A vacation from us
for one day
She doesn’t have to be
someone’s mother
miracle
I love her for this
for one day
inside a book
we get to be
somebody else too
When
the weather
gods bewitch you
with heat and humidity
one day and freezing the next,
how do you always come up on top?
Or will you?
We’ll have to wait and see.
This is a found poem based on notes taken during Brian Keepers’ sermon at Trinity Reformed Church in Orange City, Iowa, on April 24, 2022. Dr. Derwin Gray is quoted within, as well.
Racism and bigotry
Are they far from here?
No, they are here
Race is a construct
based on power
Forgive us our silence
God’s new creation
multiethnic
international
we are not color blind
we are color blessed
beautiful kaleidoscope
of humanity
God chose to create a
revolutionary gospel
of reconciliation
The love of Christ
compels us to act
mending
healing
restoring Shalom
(Can’t have peace without justice, for
peace and justice are married.)
Love makes us courageous
We must become extremists of love
Racism isn’t far away from here,
But the living Jesus is not far
away either.
It won’t be easy
we have to do this
I know of no other Gospel
The past is a glorified gauntlet,
Where one side of the challenge
is a ready stream of if-onlys and wishes
beyond the hope of tomorrow
But on the other side is
a source of joy and pride in
a life well-lived, strength
sustaining me into the future
Which is to say, it is punishment
only if I walk the gauntlet
letting that side beat me up
with its
glorified
regrets