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

Camas Lilies

Consider the lilies of the field,
the blue banks of camas opening
into acres of sky along the road.
Would the longing to lie down
and be washed by that beauty
abate if you knew their usefulness,
how the natives ground their bulbs
for flour, how the settler’s hogs
uprooted them, grunting and gleeful
oblivion as the flowers fell?

And you—what of your rushed
and useful life? Imagine setting it all down–
papers, plans, appointments, everything –
leaving only a note: “Gone
to the fields to be lovely. Be back
when I’m through with blooming.”

Even now, unneeded and uneaten,
the camas lilies gaze out above the grass
from their tender blue eyes.
Even in sleep your life will shine.
Make no mistake. Of course
your work will always matter.
Yet Solomon in all his glory
was not arrayed like one of these.

Lynn Ungar
https://www.lynnungar.com/

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Next Read Around is February 4, 2022 at 4:00 PM PST

My Thoughts

Who invented work? I mean the whole idea of it with all the weight of our lives it now carries: that we have to work for a living; that living is something we aim for or earn—that we might get a little plot of land where flowers can grow on our grave. If that’s what it amounts to then why wait to blossom? I don’t know if that’s what Ungar meant to convey in her poem, Camas Lilies, but that’s where the notion of separating our usefulness (to ourselves, to others, to the world) from our innate beauty took me. So much of our identity in the world gets wired up with what we do for a “living,” that we lose sight of what living is all about. Of course, we don’t have to divorce our being from our doing, but bridging that gap can seem near impossible in a world that wants and needs us to be a certain way and do certain things. I know many people, like me, who choose work that is personally meaningful and that we love to do, but still feel we cannot set down our “papers, plans, appointments, everything” and just be. And when we lose sight of being, our light may have no place to shine but in our sleep and our work, however meaningful, may itself become a kind of sleepwalking. I don’t know if she knew that camas lilies are said to represent the ability to speak what you want to create, but I love her line about going to the fields to be lovely and staying there until you are through with blooming. It is a beautiful idea, if only we could find the time and give ourselves permission to do it. Perhaps the lilies teach us that the first step is to speak what we want in such a beautiful way it encourages it to bloom.

Prompt Menu

  1. Find something in the world, ideally something in nature, as a focus for your writing and use Ungar’s opening line, “Consider the…” and write what follows from there. Separate its usefulness in the world from your direct experience of it or from what it might be like to be the object.

  2. Consider an animal or child or a person acting in gleeful oblivion unaware of consequences of their action. For instance, my cat will claw at pushpins on my corkboard pulling them down and then kick them around the room unaware that she is leaving little daggers that I might step on.

  3. Consider a time when you were able to set down your “papers, plans, appointments, everything” and just be. If you do not recall such an experience, what would allow you to do so? Describe what it is like or what you imagine it would be like.

  4. Journal or write a poem about your —or moments that make up your— “rushed and useful life.”

  5. If you could set everything down and leave a note, what would your note say?

  6. If you were to go off somewhere with the intention of not returning until you are through with blooming, what would you do to bloom and how would know you were done?

  7. Journal or write a poem about the many ways we can go through the motions in life (sleepwalk through life). What hapens to our light when we do?

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