I loved the frozen river time to start my day. Still quite cold. The brook is freezing and soon it will support my weight. I’m grateful, today, for the opportunity to create two different writing events, sharing poetry and prose, creating community, listening to truth and beauty. First, interviewing the co-editors of a new poetry anthology of Catalan poets in translation, and with the special addition of one of the Catalan poets live, as well: Rosa Font Massot reading her poems in Catalan.

XEIXA: FOURTEEN CATALAN POETS

by Marlon L. Fick and Francisca Esteve

“Xeixa: Fourteen Catalan Poets is an astonishingly generous collection that teaches us how to take a hurt and make it into a song, teaches us how a private whisper can become everyone’s private whisper, how a poem in Catalan can become an equally beautiful, terrifying, inspiring poem in English. What a gorgeous, necessary book. Bravo.”

— Ilya Kaminsky, Author of Deaf Republic and Dancing in Odessa

All the Seas

To be one field means to be all fields with flowers and wheat or apple trees and pomegranates by the road.
To be a sea means being all seas,

the essence of blue in serene inlets
and to navigate forever without a course.
To be a branch is to be all branches,
birch and ash, willow and cypress —
to draw new paths in unexplored skies.
One book is all books:
light of the cosmos, letters of thousands
of existing alphabets, lost or not yet come to be. One voice is the voice of all those who do not speak, the voice of the forgotten, the voiceless:
it is yours and mine. . . . [excerpt]

In the late afternoon, we had our annual open readings for the Farm Pond Writer’s Collective and I’m bursting with pride, joy, satisfaction for this lovely, lovely gathering of writers and friends and loved ones to hear the writing, in poetry and prose, shared by the members over dinner and the story fire. We listened, deeply, to each other’s hearts and minds, wisdom and hurt and joy and I felt: this is what I am devoted to, this writing life, building community, telling stories, appreciating each other, creating a safe place for vulnerability, and a way to see and share the beauty of what matters most to each of us in this life.