#NewThisDay Writing From My Photo Stream

To be held

by the light

was what I wanted,

to be a tree drinking the rain,

no longer parched in this hot land. . .

~ Excerpt from “To Be Held” by Linda Hogan

Before I even had my coffee, I stood barefoot on the cold tile kitchen floor and felt myself dancing. Dancing for Inauguration Day. Then, the coffee, more outpouring of cheefulness. But, at the river, solemnity. Four years have passed. January sun won’t shine for now, this morning. And here, on the surface of the Charles, is an etch a sketch, a shaken scene, a powdered disarray. What has been drawn is erasing and what will be drawn not yet shaped. I walk very slowly back toward the house through the field and stop as I’m passing the winter garden. My friend has given me a note about my garden poem, something I need to solve, and I stop and puzzle it out and come up with a new idea of saying what I want to say. Indoors, I meet with the Farm Pond Writers and lead the prompt on candles and candlelight and the writing and sharing goes deep. We write the new moment in. By the time we close at noon it has begun. My girls are watching the television and I join them. Not for long, I go to a poetry workshop with Vanessa Gabb and we read Bernadette Mayer’s prose and talk about writing the day. My daughter in the kitchen makes a vegetable soup and it’s delicious and Frank has brought fresh croissants from the French bakery nearby and this is a comforting winter meal and I watch the news and there is a President Biden in the house and I let the soup, it’s thick and very much like a stew, feed me, and there is straweberry jam to spread on the crispy croissant.