The Uses of Poetry

Every day we start our interdisciplinary palliative care meeting with a poem. It helps us center, and we are able to focus on our patients, their families, and how we can best serve them. Today's poem, read by our chaplain, is by Pat Snyder, who started the Amherst Writers & Artists Workshop:


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THE PATIENCE OF ORDINARY THINGS

It is a kind of love, is it not?
How the cup holds the tea,
How the chair stands sturdy and foursquare,
How the floor receives the bottoms of shoes
Or toes.  How soles of feet know
Where they’re supposed to be.
I’ve been thinking about the patience
Of ordinary things, how clothes
Wait respectfully in closets
And soap dries quietly in the dish,
And towels drink the wet
From the skin of the back.
And the lovely repetition of stairs.
And what is more generous than a window?

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I hope today I can be as generous as my shoes, as open as a window.

And today's NaPoWriMo prompt:

"Today’s prompt is drawn from an idea that Kelsey Howard gave me — that of a poem that tells a lie. I think you could have a poem that’s all lies (that could be very funny — full of things like “the sun is the size of a nickel”) or a poem that steadily builds to telling one big whopper. I can imagine these being very poignant, or very much like goofy shaggy-dog stories. I suppose it all comes down to what you want to lie about!"

Maybe I will get to that one later. 

Blessings on this day!

NaPoWriMo! 
Or, to put it in less confusing terms, National Poetry Writers Month.

I am not a writer or a poet except that I write sometimes and sometimes I write things that could be a poem if you are being generous. But, today I will try to use a prompt!

"write a poem that has the same first line as another poem"

Rather than overthink it, I will choose a random first line from my shelf. And the winner is...

What name do I have for you?
(first line of "Just Walking Around" by John Ashbery.)
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What name do I have for you?

You are the nameless one; we call you by all names.

I call you mother, mama, mommy. Or father, daddy, grandpa.

You are my dearest friend and my beloved. You

Are the stranger who knows my deepest secrets.

Sometimes I call you in wordless cries, with tears and moaning.

Or, in silence, in stillness.

Your name is in the wind.

In the call of the whippoorwill, the red-winged blackbird.

Your name is the purring of the cat.

Your name is the shriek of the owl at night.

Your name cannot be voiced; your voice cannot be named.

The name I have for you comes to me clearly only in dreams.

You are eternity.