#NewThisDay Writing From My Photo Stream

Rain sculpted ice: Tulip ghost

. . . This moment, this seed, this wave of the sea, this look, this instant of love.
Years over wars and an imagining of peace. Or the expiation journey
toward peace which is many wishes flaming together,
fierce pure life, the many-living home.
Love that gives us ourselves, in the world known to all
new techniques for the healing of the wound,
and the unknown world.  One life, or the faring stars.. .

~Excerpt from “Elegy in Joy,” by Muriel Rukeyser

Oh, dear, I have “hired” these volunteers, middle schoolers, to help with a project. And they are distracted, chaotic, impulsive, and not the least bit helpful, and I must get them home safely to their parents, an impossible chore, as it turns out. . . one of my staff gets unaccountably aggressive with a girl, pushes her down; and they drift away, they leap off buildings, they injure themselves. . . I’m relieved to wake up from this crazy responsibility. Strange, this new dream pattern. What will it be tomorrow? What a heavy load of rain fell, has fallen, still falls, over this land. It’s dark when I go out because the clouds dim the world. Charlie and I go, Suzi turns back, I don’t blame her. Where the ice has grown is running clear in all the melt, and the rain leaves muted images, like the one I find above. I call it a tulip. It was a tulip. Now, it’s the ghost of a tulip. I accomplish a lot, despite catching Frank’s cold. I send out my newsletter. “I am “running into the new year,” thanks to the inspiration of Lucille Clifton. Thoughts of review, this decade, and aiming my intentions toward the next, rounding the corner of 2019. Last night at dinner I told my youngest: you have been through high school and college entirely in this last decade. Her tremendous growth and shifts are also mine. It’s fun to visit her and her boyfriend in their apartment away from home, to see their taste and their cheerful economy of hand-me-downs and mixture of pieces collected from his house and hers. Red, a defining feature. She was in middle school at the start of this decade. And she was not crazed and impulsive at all. She was discovering herself as a performer, a fine one. And trying to learn to write with a learning disability. Last night, she shared that too. How this last decade she went from being dependent on me to “type” her papers for her (as she dictated) to being able to write fluently, cogently, impressively, independently. Mastering what she was sure she never could. What will this next decade bring? What do I want to declare? I want to declare what I always declare: a passion for reading poetry and writing, original, as it’s being shaped and brought into the world. Stories, the stories we all need to tell, to listen. Today I reviewed two poems sent to me to look at. This is necessary as food for nourishment. And, so is rain, into the river and all over my head and shoulders and puddled under my feet on the ice.

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