At a café, a kind stranger named Ben swapped tables with me so I could plug in a computer. I learned that he is a studying for a degree in Construction Management, to build smart houses that will shape the future of how we live.
His word, resilience, brings me to some news I want to share: an anthology I have co-edited, And Still She Rises: Women’s Stories of Resilience, is finished and in the process of finding a publisher. Its instagram page contains some great quotes from the writers, and its editors, Kerry Garvin and I, are planning a men’s companion anthology.
The Stranger: Ben
The Word: Resilience
The poem I wrote:
Fact one: you won’t remember this
when you are a hundred. Fact two:
throughout human history, the ways
to exclude are murder and gossip.
Men murder. Women gossip.
Fact three: gossip ripples through school
as a gunshot ripples through the body’s water.
You told. Those you told
told. They told the big guns.
The girls wore scarlet letters
on their chests, rode the bus
home crying.
This is the ouroboros of hurt.
Its facts we can forget. But resilience
comes (what could they be feeling?)
by asking (what would life be without them?)
questions (what do you think I could have done better?)
The Challenge: Do you have a poem in you on this word? Write one here.
May 8, 2019 at 1:19 pm
What a marvelous and visual poem you wrote. I love it.
May 9, 2019 at 4:55 pm
Undertaker Bees
Here they come,
dancing,
their bee arms entangled with their dead.
Undertaker bees
struggle bodies out the hive,
but the dead cannot forget
common cause.
They grab and hold,
the partners roll,
flip, lie on the carcass pile
slowly pry free the
small hooks and hairs
of shared lives.
Loyal drones have finally
stopped flying,
eating and working,
but belonging has resilience
beyond death.
May 12, 2019 at 12:01 pm
Nesting Season
Spring travelers arrive–
house-hunting pairs
of mallards and mourning doves
circle to peruse the options.
The same stupid goose,
the one who lacks foresight,
nests atop the serval’s cage.
“Goslings can’t fly” I hiss.
Imprinted on a stranger’s kindness
she flies 1,000 miles each year
to the memory of home
trusting that kindness is a pattern.
I bustle my own ducklings to the car
and buckle them in.
We choose our favorite zoo animals.
That goose, I say, wondering how I will pay the mortgage.
Maybe resilience is a pattern.
May 13, 2019 at 1:30 pm
Rigidly Resilient
Life. It knocks us down. Do we give in if we are trapped,
Meet it with some fortitude or, finding means, adapt?
That which does not kill us still can hurt a lot.
We cope with that which is. What we get is what we got.
Depending on what is “is” seems a silly thing to say
But is it for right now or forever that we pay?
Do we always get that which we deserve
As we go straight forward when, perhaps, we should have swerved?
If you’re looking for some answers within the shortness of this poem,
Be aware, I’ve few, though one could write a tome.
I admire your persistence, your pliability,
Your ability to ply, your elasticity.
It takes a certain strength, enduring to be tough,
One step and then another, not crying, “that’s enough.”
Is it not the blowing wind that coerces trees to bend?
Is not flexibility called strength before the end?
The mighty oak is strong, but in a forceful gale,
Its rigidity, in irony, is that which makes it frail.
Does not the pliant willow, with its branches flailing,
Find laughter more than weeping as giving in is not failing.
Be a willow or an oak. Yield or be unbending.
There are other pithy sayings. You know where this is tending…
We have many aphorisms. Most of them are brilliant.
Choosing one of moment will help you be resilient.
Here is yet another– Bend to the point of breaking
Then find another axiom for advice you will be taking…