Daily Prompt: What to Call It

On a drippy July hike in Dolly Sods, my husband, Matt Weiser, took this photo. The bell-shaped flowers glowed white among mosses and ferns. They seemed to me flowers that fairies (if such beings existed, of course) might live among. 

Back home, we learned from a search that the plant is Monotropa uniflora. Common names: ghost plant, Indian pipe, corpse plant. It grows in dark environments, like forest understories, and is rare.

Knowing about the natural world makes me feel more connected to it. Every named species has a story behind its moniker. Learning accurate names of neighborhood birds, trees and other plants has been a necessity. I use facts when I am teaching and recording.

But in my mind, the plant I saw on a carefree afternoon is still "fairy flower." I can't get used to the other names.

Prompt: Next time you come across an animal, or a flower or another plant you are unfamiliar with, wait a moment to ask what it's called. Look first. Allow your imagination to offer a name. What you think of reveals a little about how you choose to see, and what matters to you. Then learn the real name and let that expand your view.

Daily Prompt: A Gentle Stretch

“Be loyal to your creativity and it will be loyal to you,” a poet told me. He is serving a life sentence in prison and spends his time in the physical confines of a cell making amends with that creativity by writing poems for the sake of it. 

Trace the word “sentence” to its Latin source and find “sentire,” meaning “feel, be of the opinion.” I realize I not only make sentences on a page, I give sentences when I speak, and when I define something or classify it. And I serve self-imposed sentences by deciding what to say and do.

Write your own sentences of small observations of what matters to you. In doing so, you sketch ideas on the page with words, and you determine what your own life sentence will be. What you pay attention to reveals who you are.

Prompt:
As you go about your day, note your observations as complete sentences. You can say them to yourself, speak them aloud (go ahead and talk to yourself...people will think you're on the phone!), or write them down.

Here's what I came up with during a morning walk.

The neighbor's sweeping leaves from the patio.
The wind lifts them and blows them away again.
Her broom is new, the broom straws yet unworn.
I'm so glad the weather's cooler.

If you can take a few more minutes, transform these sentences into a poem.

September Thursday

Wind lifts leaves from the patio,
blows them away. Fresh broom straws,
cooler weather. Neighbor sweeping--

A sketch written purely to exercise the poetic mind, feed the creativity muscle. It's like taking a gentle stretch. 

Daily Prompt: Reading Earwax and Other Things

An environmental chemist analyzed ear wax from a blue whale, reading each waxy layer to tell the animal's hormonal and chemical biography. The light and dark layered stripes of the 10-inch plug revealed clues about food availability, social status, contaminant pollution and environmental noise. With their training, scientists read keratins and lipids from a species unlike their own. Whales  are sentinels: their lives reveal the ocean's health. Reading the ear wax, the chemist said, "gives us a new way of asking questions and getting answers."

The word "read" derives from Dutch and German words for "advise" and "guess." "Read" connotes interpretation, as in reading riddles or dreams. 

When we pay attention, we read faces, environmental cues, a baby's cries. We may be trained to interpret charts, animal behavior, symptoms, the smell of cake baking. We also read changes in the weather, changes in ourselves; we revise our opinions and question our perceptions as we read deeper into situations and circumstances. Attending to the world with a poetic mind means reading in multiple ways. We are all baleen whales filtering observations like krill; our observations feed us.

Prompt: What are you skilled at reading? Maybe you are skilled at reading documents, children's needs, your staff's conflicts, plants, cats, traffic patterns, music, poetry? Acknowledge that skill. 

Dedicate ten minutes to reading the day or evening. Sit or take a walk, paying attention to patterns of landscape, sounds and the stories they tell. Note one thing that's new for you. How do you interpret that? Use that observation as a starting point for a poem. Or just enjoy having noticed and call it a day.



American River

As long as a woman’s forearm,
as thick as a wrist,
the salmon’s gray; the water’s hazy.

If I lifted her with spread hands
she’d fall to pieces in the middle 
where scavengers excavated a hole.

Roe’s piled like pink pearls, the color 
of a tea rose whose curved petals 
are falling in my friend’s front yard.

Shiny fish’s eggs exposed
to Saturday sun – rows of treasure 
she swam with, swam with for miles.

published in Peter Parasol

Daily Prompt: Lists and Leaves

Cooler mornings indicate that summer has shifted to autumn. Leaves are falling. This season marks beginnings, a return to school, and endings, the dormancy of plants. The light, colors, scents and sounds change every day. Fallen leaves pile up like grains of sand to make brown drifts when the wind blows. This is also the season of making lists for holidays plans and things to do. Combine these to practice a poetic mind.

Prompt:  
Notice the leaves--on the trees, falling and fallen. 

List words that describe:

sounds leaves make (shoosh, crunch, crackle....)
verbs that capture the movement of leaves (drift, sway, twirl....)
colors of leaves (amber, pumpkin, grasshopper green....)

Stop there with your list. 
Or combine some words. Choose an emotion (relief, nostalgia, ?). Combine your leaf list words with other to convey that emotion without naming it. 

Daily Prompt: Noticing in Place

After a series of meandering turns on unfamiliar roads in Ashland, Oregon, I found a swing hanging from a thick cork tree over a duck pond in a small cemetery. This is no ordinary swing; it's a hanging sofa assembled from a springed metal bed frame, cut and welded into a gentle angle, softened with a futon mattress. This is a spot to watch the sun rise and turn fields gold, to see dust clouds kicked up by horses dashing to the fence for morning hay. 

I settled into the swing, letting the quiet morning unfold. A flock of starlings flew in parabolas, shifting from apostrophes to asterisks to dashes depending on the angle of their black bodies against the sky. Sandpipers picked insects from a mowed field as sprinklers dampened the ground. A hawk settled with a rustle overhead, indiscernible among brown branches. I stayed until the sun came up high enough to be overly warm on my face, and surrendered the swing to whomever would rest on it next. 

That swing is a Day Poem. Someone made it, using what he or she had on hand, frame, futon, chain, tree. Making it took into account structure, intent, usability and placement. And then the maker offered the swing up as a thing to be shared. Within the swing, a sitter makes her own observations and connection, finds her own rest. Think of your poems as a formed thing hovering in space like that swing as an offering to the place, an invitation to stop and notice. 

Later, I started a poem.

Memorial Hills

A salute to cemetery trees:
their branches and leaves

shade damp ground
where loved ones rest

(the unloved too) bound
by roots sipping nourishment.

Buried bones cheered by birds in nests
grasp that every one is heaven sent.

Prompt: Observe for a few minutes in a new place, maybe on a park bench during your lunch break, on a low wall while out walking the dog, or drag a chair to a corner of your yard you usually do not sit in. Don't write. Notice without judging or classifying. A few hours or days later, take a few minutes and recall your impressions. Let imagination work on memory. Compose a poem in your head. Or write down lines. You're exercising your poetic mind either way.