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 8/22/2024 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

If emotions are the ride we take on life events— most of which are as fleeting as the flap of a butterfly’s  wings — then we will live at the whim of the current. Take remorse, the pain of a guilty conscience grown wild, with all its consequential branches and thorny stems of dark if-only and what-if blossoms. The guilty deserve pushishment and so we punish ourselves by repeatedly wrangling with the thorns , reruning the sting until it loops into remorse. The whole pattern has a lifespan, whatever it may be for you, recycling over and over untill it spins out. But with courage and the patience to pick the lock that opens the heart, something magical happens. Juan Ramón Jiménez’ poem, Remorse, describes the moment when remorse composts to create “a place just right to hold painful memories.“ Then one day we walk into the garden of our sorrows and see beauty growing from the dirt.

Remorse

Time must have covered it over
with roses so
it would not be remembered.

One particular rose,
that has an unexpected magic,
on top of each lonely hour of gold
or shadows,
a place just right to hold painful memories.

So that among the divine
and joyful climbing roses, scarlet, white,
which would leave no room for the past,
the soul would be
wound into
the body.

—Juan Ramón Jiménez
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Juan_Ramón_Jiménez

Prompt Ideas

  1. Journal or write a poem about remorse.

  2. Journal or write a poem about the past events in your life that time has covered over with roses.

  3. Use Jiménez phrase ”the lonely hour of gold and shadows” as a prompt. For instance, start with the stem sentence: In the lonely hour of gold and shadows…

  4. Journal or write a poem about “a place just right for painful memories”: What kind of place is it and how does it “hold” painfull memories?

  5. C.G. Jung once said, We do not get rid of problems, we out grow the need for them. Journal or write about the new growth that leaves no room for the past. What beauty has grown out of the garden of your sorrows?

  6. Jiménez descirbes how the soul is wound into the body through the climbing roses that grow out of the place that holds painful memories. Journal or write apoem about how soul and body are connected.

  7. In what way might painful experiences and painful memories be food for the soul?

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