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:

Next Read-Around is 11/2/23 at 5:00 PM PST

How It Works:

  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

My Thoughts

Bitter sweet is such a beautiful word, bridging opposites, referring not just to the mix of primal opposites in taste, but to the the mix of divergent emotion, like a duet of wonder and grief.  Of all our memories and our moments,  It is the bitter sweet that often moves us to tears: a mix of sorrow and tenderness, of grief and gratitude; that moment looking back at our tragic foolishness as a comedy of errors and brilliant blunders. The unsullied emotions, the wild joys and dark despairs, can’t quite touch the heart as does the bittersweet. Mark, Nepo’s poem, Adrift, drops is right in the middle of the bittersweet sea, adrift between the intimacy of the everyday and all that slips through our fingers, immersed in our grief, surrounded by beauty and "punctured by a holiness that exists inside everything."

Adrift

Everything is beautiful and I am so sad.
This is how the heart makes a duet of
wonder and grief. The light spraying
through the lace of the fern is as delicate
as the fibers of memory forming their web
around the knot in my throat. The breeze
makes the birds move from branch to branch
as this ache makes me look for those I’ve lost
in the next room, in the next song, in the laugh
of the next stranger. In the very center, under
it all, what we have that no one can take
away and all that we’ve lost face each other.
It is there that I’m adrift, feeling punctured
by a holiness that exists inside everything.
I am so sad and everything is beautiful.

—Mark Nepo
https://apoemaday.tumblr.com/post/722934484240105472/adrift

Prompt Ideas

  1. Write an ode to sadness

  2. Journal or write a poem based on the experienceor idea of bittersweet

  3. Journal or write a poem reflecting on an experience of being sad while surrounded by beauty

  4. Describe the beauty of some small thing, like light through leaves, or the esthetics of color and shape in a loose pile of debris or a stack of books and papers or a garden that is overgrown.

  5. Journal or write a poem about the experience of looking for something. What is your search strategy? Consider the experience of looking for some mysterious “next” thing—what is it like when you have a hunger for something you cannot name.

  6. What is something you have that no one can take away?

  7. Personify a conversation between “what no one can take away” and “all that you’ve lost.” What might they say to each other?

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