Last night in my monthly online poetry critique group I shared a first draft of a poem. I never do this. I didn't love it, I didn't hate it. I was curious about it. While the sun blazed outside yesterday afternoon I stayed indoors, because I am home from a month at the beach where I did not write. I wrote this poem from my journal - it was generated from a prompt my friend Seema Reza offered in a workshop at the Power of Words Conference on non-linear narrative. The conference was also on a beach, but I went to her workshop in 100-degree heat because she's a writer I admire. The prompt was "Tell me what you know about. . . " and I wrote about my mother's imagination, a story she told me about playing hookie from catechism, wearing a brand new coat, and getting blasted by soot from a passing train, ruining her coat. I am writing it as a story about how she escaped the limits of her mother's imagination - her Catholicism. My mother didn't cut ties with church until she married and left home, but here is a story of how we break ties before we're able to leave a place we know doesn't suit our spirit.

The working title of the poem I shared last night was "Tracks." And my group helped me change it to "Tracts." 

I'm wondering what does this have to do with my photos this morning? 

On Facebook, where I post my Instagram photos as I take them, a friend commented about the picture I took this morning of milkweed by the railroad tracks where so many wildflowers bloom in direct sun:

"It looks like a seeding plant magically turned bird-about to take flight."

Yes, that must be what I was picturing too when I took the photo and cropped it. 

Flight. Like my mother, head hanging hatless over the train tracks, taking flight from limits of her mother's imagination - I am a milkweed bird this morning in flight.