1. Read the poem 

  2. Do your own reflection on it, noting what it inspires in you

  3. Feel free to use your own reflection as your prompt or…

  4. Use the selection of prompts below the poem

  5. Pick one that inspires you and write (feel free to use only one or write several poems using different prompts) or…

  6. Don’t use any of the provided prompts and follow your inspiration from wherever it comes

Front Door

Wherever I have lived,
walking out the front door
every morning
means crossing over
to a foreign country.

One language inside the house,
another out.
The food and clothes
and customs change,
the fingers on my hand turn
into forks.

I call it adaptation
when my tongue switches
from one grammar to another,
but the truth is I’m addicted now,
high on the rush of daily displacement,
speeding to a different time zone,
heading into altered weather,
landing as another person.

Don’t think I haven’t noticed
you’re on the same trip too.

—Imtiaz Dharker
http://www.imtiazdharker.com

Please join Writing From The Inside Out by attending the read-around sessions on Friday afternoons. It’s free, fun, a great way to share, and reading a poem is optional. If you have not registered, click the button below; and if you have registered, you do not need to register again, simply use the link sent to you in your confirmation email. Register Here:

Next Read Around is July 29, 2022 at 4:00 PM (PST)

My Thoughts

Who among us has not felt, at least on some occasion, a gulf between the world in our homes and the world we engage outside? Whatever the cause, the inner and outer environments get parsed into separate realities. The experience can be both an actual division between contexts inside and outside one’s home and those between the world inside and outside of oneself. Pakistani born British poet Imtiaz Dharker captures the duality beautifully in her poem Front Door. The outer world can seem like a foreign place with its own language and culture to which we must adapt, creating a kind of duality of presence in our lives. The feeling of being displaced is especially true for immigrants and for anyone migrating from one place to another. This poem speaks to me because I am adjusting to my new home in the Midwest—still living out of boxes, still immersed in the calculus of what is lost and what is gained, still navigating the newness of the environment in which I have landed—highlighting the contrast between the inner life I carry with me and the new world to which I am adapting. As Dharker points out, the experience of being displaced can be thrilling. It can even serve as an invitation to land as “another person,” a invitation we receive every time we step out our “front door” into the world. What world do you face and what unfolds for you when you step out your front door?

Prompt Menu

  1. Journal or write a poem about the contrast between who you are in your home world and who you are in the outer world or who you become in a particular context in the outer world.

  2. In what way is walking out your front door a crossing (between worlds, between selves, between mindsets, etc.)? Journal or write a poem about what shifts in you, practically and metaphorically, as you cross over that threshold.

  3. Explore the difference between a “front door” crossing and a “back door” crossing? How is your front door between the world and you different than your back door between the world and you? What shifts in you as you make those crossings? What differs bwetween who or what you let come in through those doors?

  4. How does the language of your home life differ from the language of your outer life (your work life or your social life)?

  5. Pick some object or experience and describe it in the language of the inner world and then describe it in the language of the outer world.

  6. Journal or write a poem about a time in your life when you were “displaced.” What displaced you, how did it affect you, and what gift(s) or learning(s) came came out of it? Or consider the daily displacement of moving between contexts in your life? How do you navigate through those transitions?

  7. Consider a time or a context in your life that offered the opportunity for you to land as “another person.” Journal or write a poem about that experience.

  8. As usual, write about whatever else inspires you from the poem or from life.