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 11/21//24 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

I have lived my life in cities and suburbs: places that offer plenty of choices for art and entertainment, for work and leisure activities; places that also come with crowds and congestion; places that run on a faster track than nature intends. It is easy then to speed up the inner clock in order to keep pace with the toil and traffic of city life. It is easy to detach from the natural world and, without knowing, lose our sense of rhythm. Perhaps many of the modern ailments of the soul arise out of our divorce from the natural world and the subsequent separation from our own true nature. Horace Kephart’s poem, To Return Again, describes the restorative benefits of a return to wild places in nature. We may think this separation is a recent phenomena. Kephart was a librarian and travel writer in the early 1900’s. His poetic rendering of the exhausted air, the imprisoning walls, the din and strife and jostling of unsympathetic crowds serves as a fitting description of the downside of city life to this day. The poem hits a stride when he turns his descriptive prowess to the wonders of nature as a salve for the soul wearied by the rush and ramble in the artificial limbo of city life.

To Return Again 

Yes
to return again and again;
to leave the exhausted air of the cities,
the imprisoning walls, the din and strife,
the jostling of unsympathetic crowds;
to escape from this artificial limbo
that has sullied the very sky til
we scarce ever lift our eyes to it;
to seek once more the pure breeze
of the open fields, the far outlook
upon a calm world fresh with
eternal youth; to bore deep into
some primeval wood; to see the
world inverted in a glassy lake;
to hear the carol of birds and the
sigh of the summer breeze, to watch
the brightening come in the east
and the day break in splendor over
an awakening world; to see the
shadows fall in the valley and
the last gleams of the afterglow
glisten on hilltops; to face the
starlit sky at night, and
dreaming awake,
to sink peacefully into
dreamless sleep—
that is Nature’s specific
for the city blight.

Horace Kephart
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horace_Kephart

Prompt Ideas

  1. Journal or write a poem about city life or about life in the place you live.

  2. What aspects of your city or town make you want to escape? Journal or write about your own version of exhausted air and imprisoning walls. Or wrote about the aspects you love about your city or town and that make you happy to live in it.

  3. Journal or write a poem about a place that you find nourishing and refreshing that you want to return to again and again.

  4. Kephart offers a list of experiences in nature “to seek once more.” What experiences (in nature, or otherwie) do you wish to seek once more. You can use that phrase as your opening line: “To seek once more…”

  5. Take any context and describe it in sensory descriptive detail.

  6. Take some aspect of nature that appeals to you (or draw form Kephat’s descriptors—the pure breeze, the world inverted in a glassy lake, the carol of birds, etc.) and expound on it.

  7. Journal or write poem about “dreaming awake.” Or, conversely, write about what constitutes a perfect night of sleep.

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