#NewThisDay Writing From My Photo Stream
Adriatic Sea, Croatia, July 2023
Morning, the same exquisite swim, my mile, my usual route, the calm and cool pond, the satisfaction. A very hot day with high humidity. We are in a heat wave. I made sure the plants were well watered. And I am trying not to be discouraged by the animals who are grabbing what they can. How hard do I want to fight them, is the question. Not very hard, I think. Wave helped me buy a few more plants on sale at my favorite garden shop, 40% off, and now I have a lot of plants to plant and Frank away still. Heat projected again for tomorrow. Tonight I had a long Zoom with two poetry pals whom I’ve spent a lot of time with workshopping poems, but not in about nine months, and we just caught up and it was really special to spend time with them and hear about their lives. We just dropped into deep conversation. We met in Truchas, New Mexico at a poetry retreat. Oh, and I had a delightful conversation with my friend Liz, the actor who has inspired me to write this new play and we had some good laughs, and also we’re excited to work together on this project, and I hope to have the play ready for a first reading in October.
Tonight I’m sharing a photo from about a year ago, from Croatia, when we were on the Adriatic sea, to celebrate my poem, Beach of Hvar with Po, which has won 3rd place in the Common Ground Review Annual Poetry Contest, judged by Rebecca Hart Olander. The issue will be published in two weeks. Rebecca's thoughtful and appreciative comments really moved me.
“The more I read this poem, the more I love it. The title is evocative and mythic. We plunge right in with the speaker from the start, in the action of swimming to shore. But then we’re in a dream of a daughter told by a mother. “Daughter-hair” slips through the mother-dreamer’s fingers, like time does, for all of us. This is a poem of time, told in what feels a place out of time, but also a place steeped in time, and elemental. Post-dream telling, we are back in the world, where these two speakers both have daughters who are now grown and are also grown daughters themselves, of now-gone mothers. The middle of the poem is the ashore time, on a rocky coast that these two women lie down upon in what feels a ritual. Steeped in matrilineage, the poet writes of wombs, of bodies over time, of slippage, of strength, of how we begin in the cells of our mothers, of how those mothers are now gone, and of how we birth our own daughters. The slipping hair, the falling stones, the gone grandmothers – this poem feels quietly epic, earthy, cyclical, and beautiful. ”