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 12/5/24 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

There is enough of broken hearts in this world of mounting catastrophes. All that is loved swept away in a flood, homes in ashes, lives on hold; loved ones placing flowers on the graves of those among the dead lucky enough to have remains. And then the long trek of the living back into their lives. We see them on the nightly news. The tragic slap, the helping hands. Deep down we know we have blood on our hands: the handprint of our greed and gluttony showing up everywhere in “random Acts of God” not to mention warring nations with weapons of mass destruction and it’s one trail of tears after another. And then the heart break over the innocent, like the loons in Mary Oliver’s poem, Lead. Our part may be obvious in oil smothered bird bodies on the beach or fish floating upside down in the lake or the Jaguar dying in the slash and burn of the Amazon forest. But these loons just laid their life down on the ground. Oliver titles the poem, Lead, not for the heavy metal as a causal indicator, but for the heft and weight of what we feel when our hearts are broken open by senseless suffering, especially of the innocent. How many times shall we close our broken hearts, without making a change, before we fall from our own collateral damage? Meanwhile, a lone poet lifts her elegant voice from the grave and cries out to break our hearts open “and never close again;” to be broken open with love and lamentaiton for this one precious planet that we must learn to share with the rest of the world.

Lead 

Here is a story
to break your heart.
Are you willing?
This winter
the loons came to our harbor
and died, one by one,
of nothing we could see.
A friend told me
of one on the shore
that lifted its head and opened
the elegant beak, and cried out
in the long, sweet, savoring of its life,
which, if you heard it,
you know as a sacred thing,
and for which, if you have not heard it,
you had better hurry to where
they still sing.
And, believe me, tell no one
just where that is.
The next morning, this loon, speckled
and iridescent with a plan
to fly home
to some hidden lake,
was dead on the shore.
I tell you this
to break your heart,
by which I mean only
that it break open and never close again
to the rest of the world.

Mary Oliver
https://wordsfortheyear.com/2020/06/18/lead-by-mary-oliver/

Prompt Ideas

  1. Journal or write a poem about a broken heart. Or make it a list poem of the many ways a heart can be broken.

  2. For what are you willing to risk breaking your heart? Write about a time when you knew something would break your heart (or someone else’s) and you did it anyway.

  3. Journal or write a poem about the experience of coming upon or discovering a dead animal.

  4. Pick an animal you commonly see in your area and journal or write a poem about it. Consider what it would be like if they suddnely died off. What would we lose? (e.g.: the squirrel’s mental map of buried nuts) What would you miss? (e.g.: the fluff and shake of the squirrel’s tail, the darting chase and dash up the tree of one squirrel after another).

  5. Journal or write a poem that cries out the long, sweet savoring of your life. You can use the propmpt, In the long, sweet savoring of my life…

  6. Consider a place, a person, or a thing you fear will soon be gone and journal or write a poem about a last visit.

  7. What is the differene between a broken heart and a heart broken open?

  8. Are you willing to have your heart broken open and never closed again? What could that mean? How would you live differently? Are you willing to have your heart broken open to the rest of the world? What could that mean and how would you live differently?

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