If you wish to attend the read around (t’s free, fun, a great way to share, and reading a poem is optional). Note: If you registered already, you do not need to register again, simply use the link sent to you in your confirmation email. Register Here:

  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

  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

Next Read-Around is 6/25/23 at 5:00 PM PST

My Thoughts

I doubt that I am the only one who has taken a certain line or phrase from a poem, some beautiful gem, and forgotten the rest.  Isn’t this the same way we take our small flame into the dark and believe we have lit the world? We forget that we do not venture into the unknown for answers.

Take Mary Oliver’s beautiful line: all my life I was a bride married to amazement. I love that line. I carried it with me as if she had gifted me a Northstar, some state of Grace I could aim for in my life. I completely forgot the darkness into which she cast that line. It can be found in her poem, When Death Comes, It struck me, upon re-reading the poem, that we do not venture into the unknown for answers, but to practice amazement in the face of the unknown so that, when death comes, we will be able to step through that door with heart wide open.

I forgot that line I so loved was only half a sentence that began, When its over, I want to say: all my life I was a bride married to amazement. I forgot that she paired that bridal line with a line about being the bride groom, taking the world into my arms.  I know I need practice, and lots of it, to sustain that amazement while embracing the world in all of its shocking brutality and piercing beauty. And, even closer to the bone, to embrace myself, and all the foolish effrontery of my life, while stepping through death’s door, (or any moment with full awareness), amazed that I never gave up the bridal vow to give myself utterly to this life, , never stopped trying to take it all into my arms, even though I so often failed at it.

When Death Comes

When death comes
like the hungry bear in autumn;
when death comes, and takes all the bright coins from his purse

to buy me, and snaps the purse shut;
when death comes
like the measle-pox:

when death comes
like an iceberg between the shoulder blades,

I want to step through the door, full of curiosity, wondering, what is it going to be like, that cottage of darkness?

And therefore I look upon everything
as a brotherhood and a sisterhood,
and I look upon time is no more than an idea,
and I consider eternity as another possibility,

and I think of each life as a flower, as common
as a field daisy, and as singular,

and each name a comfortable music in the mouth
ending, as all music does, towards silence,

in each body, a lion of courage, and something
precious to the earth.

When it’s over, I want to say: all my life
I was a bride married to amazement.
I was the bride groom, taking the world into my arms.

When it’s over, I don’t want to wonder
if I made of my life something particular, and real.
I don’t want to find myself, sighing and frightened,
or full of argument.

I don’t want to end up, simply having visited this world.

—Mary Oliver
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/mary-oliver

Prompt Ideas

  1. Journal or write a poem using the prompt, When death comes…

  2. Mary Oliver lists a variety of ways that death might come. Journal or write a list poem of the ways death might come to you.

  3. How do you look upon the things of the world, your connectedness to things, and the possibility of eternity through the lens of your mortality?

  4. Journal or write a poem about how each life is as common as a field daisy and as singular.

  5. What name (of a thing or a person) is like comfortable music in your mouth? What thing or person stills the critical vouces inside or brings you to silence or as Stephen Sondheim wrote for the song Maria in West Side Story, Say it loud and there's music playing, Say it soft and it's almost like praying

  6. What might you like to say about your life “when it’s over.” Use the prompt, When it’s over… and free write whatever coes to mind from there. Or apply the idea to the current phase of your life or some troubling project or issue in your life. Or apply the idea above to current events. When (fill in the blank with a current event—the war in Ukraine, the next election, the trial, etc.) is over…

  7. Journal Write a list poem about what you want to avoid whe you come face to face with death. Use the prompt, When its over, I don’t want…

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