Coincidentally, I’ve been working on a poem about a feeling I can’t seem to shake, a weight that refuses to lift. A couple of weeks ago, I met a very important deadline at work, just barely, as is often the case in real estate development. But instead of feeling the thrill of victory or the satisfaction of seeing the project through, this time was different. I felt different. It didn’t feel like winning. It felt as though I had lost something of myself along the way, and instead of moving forward, I find myself wanting to go back and search for it. It’s difficult to explain. Perhaps I've been spending too much time with the birds!
I don’t think it’s possible to spend too much time with birds, is it!? Maybe spend more time with them instead, and ask them if they have any insights into the situation? I find experiences like the one you’re describing so interesting (but also frustrating and disorienting) . . . like you’re trying to follow this trail backwards, but it wasn’t a journey you expected you’d have to take, so you didn’t leave markers for yourself to make the path clear. I hope you find clarity, Sam - or some really good questions to live inside of!
Your poem, as beautiful as it was read aloud, is so moving on the page, and I'm glad for the opportunity to read it again. As a mom, I was there with you have endured many sleepless nights of my own, as we all do. Thank you for sharing this work and your process although I would argue, as you said, perhaps this, too, is your "best." It surely gives all the feels. Thank you for your encouraging words and for the thought-provoking prompt as well. I will sit with that awhile. :)
Thank you so much, Denise! I loved hearing your poems yesterday, too, and am so glad to have met you now. Hmmm I’m taking your words in and thinking maybe there’s a sense in which every poem and every draft we write is our best - because it’s our best for that particular time and moment we’re in. It feels to me like every poem I write needs to be written . . . some strictly for the process and others for the sake of both process and product.
Yes! That's absolutely true. I think the same can be said for timing. Our work would not be the version it is were it not for the versions of ourselves that we've become through our experiences. (I wrote about that in a blog some time ago.)
I'm still kicking myself for missing the reading. Please tell me there is another one soonish!
I bookmark all of your posts until I can come back and do the prompts. Thank you for the work you do here (and at home with your precious barfing boy, even when you are also ill).
Thank you so much, Margaret Ann! I’m tickled to hear that my posts are (at least in your view) bookmark-worthy!
Leeann and I are hoping to host another reading in April, so stay tuned for the date! And if you have any suggestions for poets whom you’d like to hear read, send the names my way. We haven’t started brainstorming about that yet, so we are wide open to suggestions, and you always seem to know where the hidden gems are around here.
I loved this poem and the brilliance of remembering that we never know what is next.. what we may feel.. what might happen. Once when I had one of those moments of surprise that what I was experiencing was nothing like what I anticipated that I would experience I came up with a phrase which I find to be a good reminder... "There is life, and then there is life with an attitude.."
What a wonderful phrase, Victress! Thank you for sharing. Sometimes, it can feel impossibly hard to drop the attitude and let myself fall straight down into the life-iness of life! And then other times, it just happens without thought or effort. 🤷♀️ Go figure!
Lisa, I loved hearing you read this poem on Sunday.. I feel it so deeply I couldn't form a response immediately. It usually takes me awhile to transition from listening to a poem and taking it in to being able to find my own words to answer. I loved the way it chimed with my poem.
I know that experience of being so desperately tired it hurts and yet going on high alert when your child needs you. Your first stanza puts it into words so beautifully.
I love how you make even the act of listening for the signs that a child is about to vomit into something beautiful. The ocean metaphor works so well here:
"listening for little shifts
in the ocean of my son’s breathing,
the sounds before the wave
of vomit, again."
I love this wry aside, it makes me laugh every time I read it:
"(Causality, darling,
is as murky as puke.)"
And this stanza knocks me off my feet:
"I do not know where
love comes from, only that
it’s umbilical—
our primal source of air,
water in which we whooshed
before the cold shock of this world
set in."
Love is umbilical! I love that so much. The way this poem is rooted in the womb, that most intimate connection between mother and child.
And "water in which we whooshed" just sings.
And I love the way you extend that womb imagery into the external world:
"the way night
wraps amniotic"
And I really like how the "again again again" of the final stanza refers not to the vomiting, but to the rinsing of the bowl-- that motherly housekeeping.
I once read an essay by a dad who said that love is bodily fluids and he listed all the ways that parents show love to their children in the cleaning up of all the various bodily messes that our children make. I think the poem is the perfect embodiment of that sentiment.
Melanie, this is such an incredibly generous response and reflection - thank you for taking so much time and care in letting me know how you experienced the poem. I was also really delighted by the resonances between our poems at the reading the other day . . . and I hope your little one is doing well physically and that the worries for their health have subsided.
And haha but also yes to the idea that parental love is bodily fluids . . . it makes me think of what my ex says was the moment when he really fully realized he was a father. Our oldest, then a baby or toddler, sneezed into his (my ex’s) bowl of cereal, and to his own surprise, he just shrugged and raised a spoonful of freshly snotted cereal to his lips and ate.
Lisa, so lovely reading your exploration of 'listen'. I always find it so interesting to see what emerges after using a single prompt for several different poems. And these lines "I hear the way night / wraps amniotic, shelters us / together in its hum." are beautiful! I feel them.
Thank you so much, Petra! I really appreciate your prompt and the way it pushed me to find another poem on the same theme. It kinda makes me want to keep going and see how many more I can manage before I’m just done with all things listening!
And I enjoyed the reading. There's something about listening to an author read their own poems aloud. It adds another dimension and rhythm that sometimes you can't get from just reading it. Thank you for being brave enough to read it for us. : )
Oh, Lisa. This resonates so deeply with the last months of caring for my dad. I would wake in the morning not knowing if or how I would physically endure the day ahead - and would find myself hours later in deep and poignant moments, pulling from all of my creativity and compassion to wrap his misery in love as tightly as I could. I’m so glad I was able to endure all those days for and with him.
I hope your little one is feeling more rightly and that you’ve gotten some rest. 🤍
Ohhhh friend, thank you for sharing this. ❤️ Caregiving asks absolutely everything of us, doesn’t it? And I’m sure that is even truer at the end. It asks everything but also calls up strength and love we didn’t know we had.
Coincidentally, I’ve been working on a poem about a feeling I can’t seem to shake, a weight that refuses to lift. A couple of weeks ago, I met a very important deadline at work, just barely, as is often the case in real estate development. But instead of feeling the thrill of victory or the satisfaction of seeing the project through, this time was different. I felt different. It didn’t feel like winning. It felt as though I had lost something of myself along the way, and instead of moving forward, I find myself wanting to go back and search for it. It’s difficult to explain. Perhaps I've been spending too much time with the birds!
I don’t think it’s possible to spend too much time with birds, is it!? Maybe spend more time with them instead, and ask them if they have any insights into the situation? I find experiences like the one you’re describing so interesting (but also frustrating and disorienting) . . . like you’re trying to follow this trail backwards, but it wasn’t a journey you expected you’d have to take, so you didn’t leave markers for yourself to make the path clear. I hope you find clarity, Sam - or some really good questions to live inside of!
Your poem, as beautiful as it was read aloud, is so moving on the page, and I'm glad for the opportunity to read it again. As a mom, I was there with you have endured many sleepless nights of my own, as we all do. Thank you for sharing this work and your process although I would argue, as you said, perhaps this, too, is your "best." It surely gives all the feels. Thank you for your encouraging words and for the thought-provoking prompt as well. I will sit with that awhile. :)
Thank you so much, Denise! I loved hearing your poems yesterday, too, and am so glad to have met you now. Hmmm I’m taking your words in and thinking maybe there’s a sense in which every poem and every draft we write is our best - because it’s our best for that particular time and moment we’re in. It feels to me like every poem I write needs to be written . . . some strictly for the process and others for the sake of both process and product.
Yes! That's absolutely true. I think the same can be said for timing. Our work would not be the version it is were it not for the versions of ourselves that we've become through our experiences. (I wrote about that in a blog some time ago.)
Yes!! And then the process of creating that work also shapes who we become next. I sometimes feel like my poems are writing me.
Same!!
Lisa, I love this poem so much.
I'm still kicking myself for missing the reading. Please tell me there is another one soonish!
I bookmark all of your posts until I can come back and do the prompts. Thank you for the work you do here (and at home with your precious barfing boy, even when you are also ill).
Thank you so much, Margaret Ann! I’m tickled to hear that my posts are (at least in your view) bookmark-worthy!
Leeann and I are hoping to host another reading in April, so stay tuned for the date! And if you have any suggestions for poets whom you’d like to hear read, send the names my way. We haven’t started brainstorming about that yet, so we are wide open to suggestions, and you always seem to know where the hidden gems are around here.
I loved this poem and the brilliance of remembering that we never know what is next.. what we may feel.. what might happen. Once when I had one of those moments of surprise that what I was experiencing was nothing like what I anticipated that I would experience I came up with a phrase which I find to be a good reminder... "There is life, and then there is life with an attitude.."
What a wonderful phrase, Victress! Thank you for sharing. Sometimes, it can feel impossibly hard to drop the attitude and let myself fall straight down into the life-iness of life! And then other times, it just happens without thought or effort. 🤷♀️ Go figure!
Lisa, I loved hearing you read this poem on Sunday.. I feel it so deeply I couldn't form a response immediately. It usually takes me awhile to transition from listening to a poem and taking it in to being able to find my own words to answer. I loved the way it chimed with my poem.
I know that experience of being so desperately tired it hurts and yet going on high alert when your child needs you. Your first stanza puts it into words so beautifully.
I love how you make even the act of listening for the signs that a child is about to vomit into something beautiful. The ocean metaphor works so well here:
"listening for little shifts
in the ocean of my son’s breathing,
the sounds before the wave
of vomit, again."
I love this wry aside, it makes me laugh every time I read it:
"(Causality, darling,
is as murky as puke.)"
And this stanza knocks me off my feet:
"I do not know where
love comes from, only that
it’s umbilical—
our primal source of air,
water in which we whooshed
before the cold shock of this world
set in."
Love is umbilical! I love that so much. The way this poem is rooted in the womb, that most intimate connection between mother and child.
And "water in which we whooshed" just sings.
And I love the way you extend that womb imagery into the external world:
"the way night
wraps amniotic"
And I really like how the "again again again" of the final stanza refers not to the vomiting, but to the rinsing of the bowl-- that motherly housekeeping.
I once read an essay by a dad who said that love is bodily fluids and he listed all the ways that parents show love to their children in the cleaning up of all the various bodily messes that our children make. I think the poem is the perfect embodiment of that sentiment.
Melanie, this is such an incredibly generous response and reflection - thank you for taking so much time and care in letting me know how you experienced the poem. I was also really delighted by the resonances between our poems at the reading the other day . . . and I hope your little one is doing well physically and that the worries for their health have subsided.
And haha but also yes to the idea that parental love is bodily fluids . . . it makes me think of what my ex says was the moment when he really fully realized he was a father. Our oldest, then a baby or toddler, sneezed into his (my ex’s) bowl of cereal, and to his own surprise, he just shrugged and raised a spoonful of freshly snotted cereal to his lips and ate.
Lisa, so lovely reading your exploration of 'listen'. I always find it so interesting to see what emerges after using a single prompt for several different poems. And these lines "I hear the way night / wraps amniotic, shelters us / together in its hum." are beautiful! I feel them.
Thank you so much, Petra! I really appreciate your prompt and the way it pushed me to find another poem on the same theme. It kinda makes me want to keep going and see how many more I can manage before I’m just done with all things listening!
Loved these lines:
"I do not know where
love comes from, only that
it’s umbilical"
And I enjoyed the reading. There's something about listening to an author read their own poems aloud. It adds another dimension and rhythm that sometimes you can't get from just reading it. Thank you for being brave enough to read it for us. : )
Thank you so much, Sam! It really is special to get to hear people read their own poems, and you read so beautifully!
Quantum Entanglement? Life is so mysterious and the tool of reason is inadequate.
You can say that again!!
Oh, Lisa. This resonates so deeply with the last months of caring for my dad. I would wake in the morning not knowing if or how I would physically endure the day ahead - and would find myself hours later in deep and poignant moments, pulling from all of my creativity and compassion to wrap his misery in love as tightly as I could. I’m so glad I was able to endure all those days for and with him.
I hope your little one is feeling more rightly and that you’ve gotten some rest. 🤍
Ohhhh friend, thank you for sharing this. ❤️ Caregiving asks absolutely everything of us, doesn’t it? And I’m sure that is even truer at the end. It asks everything but also calls up strength and love we didn’t know we had.
This is one of my all-time favorites! I love the way you love your boys!
Well, I learned from the best! Thanks, Mom! 💜