Poetry Peeps! You’re invited to join our November poetry challenge!

Here’s the scoop: we’re diving into The Year As A ________, prompt, riffing off of the Jan Richardson poem to which Tab introduced us last year. I love prompts like this, which allow us to view the world through other eyes. What has the year been to you, Peeps? Which Animal? Vegetable? Mineral? Element? Planet? Motion? Emotion? Are you considering? Even better, are you in? Good! Be ready to share November 27th – right after Thanksgiving, so plan accordingly! – in a blog post and/or on social media with the tag #PoetryPals. See you then!

Whew.

Sheesh, it’s the end of October!?!?

Beloveds, it has been a MINUTE. And it’s been a minute not improved upon by various maladies which my immune system is sending to let me know just how unhappy it is with *gestures futilely* ALL the things. When we got together for our poetry meet-up this past Sunday, I got a sense that we’re all kind of “in it” at this point. There’s just something about this time of year when we can feel the calendar speeding up, and our grasp on the accelerating details is a fingernail’s grip. Sometimes, it really does feel like we are all seconds from some sort of implosion.

I was thinking about that as we discussed that this form was more complex than it maybe seemed at first, then Liz asked if any of us had topics in mind for our poems. She mentioned that she might write something about politics. I jokingly said something like, “Oh, is that the energy you’re going to go with?” To which she replied in her perfectly Liz fashion, “Well, I wanted to write something kind of hopeful.”

Same, girl, same.

Hopeful is… tricky for me, though. I want to resist the blithe naivete of hope for hope’s sake while at the same time, I know it’s entirely too easy these days to tip the other direction, to get into our heads and become crosswise of our own selves, isolating and resenting, or maybe mourning. We’re deciding to stay in instead of touching grass, reveling in the stars, and reminding ourselves that the world is bigger than whatever poison pours into our ears and crouches heavy on our hearts while digging in its claws and breathing murderous doom into our faces. The facts are these: this little corner of the universe isn’t the whole blue marble. We’re sad, but we’re not… special. Other nations have faced the systemic injustice that breeds poverty, food insecurity, violence, fraud and grift, displacement, and wars. Other people have lived under despotic fearmongering, nationalism, militarized governments, and disinformation. There is genuinely nothing new under the sun, something which vexed me exceedingly to be told as a child, but, just as annoyingly, turns out to be the truth. Same song, second verse.

Weirdly, I could feel that sameness working in the terzanelle. Taking the shorter terza rima and the longer villanelle, it balances the relentless repetition of the second against the less insistent dance of the first. The terzanelle allows the reader to come to terms with an idea and allows the writer to enlarge on it while bringing in other elements, allowing it to be greater than the sum of its parts. (At least in theory.) Mostly, it gave me room to think. When looked at from all angles, what even is hope?

Like Liz, I wanted to bring something hopeful into my poem – but not “hope” as a polished bit of shiny. I wanted this hope to be… colorless, odorless, overlooked; a hope that keeps the necessary smallness that is required to, say, crack a granite mountain, drop by drop. I want a hope that is a seed we cultivated, since a seed is a verb. I want a hope that’s a bulb we must plant – like the four hundred and fifty bulbs Himself planted last weekend – with hope that after the disease that’s decimated our yard, something will back from the poison, with faith that all of the added soil and the treatments will tip the scales on the nematodes and the blight. We planted in determination that by our hope-in-action, beauty and birds and bees and butterflies will again feel welcome in a narrow place of peace in the world. As with flowers, vegetables, and growing things, that kind of hope can be shared.

The work of digging the furrows, laying out the bulbs, and the hopes we held as we put them to bed and covered them echoes what feels true to this moment nationally, internationally, and personally. In some things, we can only live in hope, as that blind drop of water in the dark, touching granite. In some times, we do what we can, prepared to do the necessary. The most we can do is our best, and we sharpen our plowshares, remembering that the earth is hard and that these are the swords we lift at our need. Not an airy word made up of aspiration and good intentions, that’s not a useful hope now. To be of use to this moment, it must be a verb. Hope is what we plant. We build. We hold.

This form wasn’t as hard as it appeared because of the magic of rhyme, the drift of my thoughts, provoked by a quote largely attributed to the Chilean poet activist, Pablo Nerudas, “Podrán cortar todas las flores, pero no podrá detener la primavera.” (You can cut all the flowers, but you cannot stop the Spring). The very clear repetition guidelines from the Writer’s Digest form map I followed also went a long way towards making this more accessible. When the Poetry Sisters chose ‘slight’ and ‘might’ as our group rhyme pair, I liked them for their David v. Goliath shape; my mom used to call us Mighty Mites when we were little for some reason (was there a cartoon at some point?🤷🏾‍♀️), and it resonated with me how small I sometimes feel in the face of the enormity of everything just now, yet how deeply disturbing our determination and resistance is to what opposes us. We are drops of water now, more blind persistence than magic bean buyers. And though we be but little, we are fierce, indeed.

I HOPE THIS HOPE FINDS YOU
a gardener’s epistolary terzanelle for a world in a season of cold
************
The chance this Hope will find you may be slight —
Time’s intersections often go askew –
Nevertheless, I’m hoping that it might:

A bulb in earth is faith in seasons new,
a prayer in deed and act. – Hope on the move,
When timing’s intersections go askew.

A gardener with nothing much to prove
plants, holds the hope the world will carry on,
that prayers of deed and act will make hope move.

We sow in faith that reapers, when we’re gone,
know hate and bloodshed cannot subtract Spring.
Plant, holding hope the world will carry on.

We stumble. Rise. Persist through scar and sting,
root rhizomes, seeds, believing change will come
since hate and bloodshed cannot subtract Spring.

This dark divides, but cannot change the sum —
The chance this hope will find you may be slight —
Plant – rhizomes, seeds. Belief. Though slow, change comes
nevertheless. Sow hope with all your might.

Thank-you, Jone, for giving us candy cravings, um, hosting Poetry Friday. Here are what some of the Poetry Peeps and my Poetry Sisters have shared: Laura’s poem is here, and Tricia’s post is here. Sara’s poem is here, and Liz’s poem is here. Mary Lee’s poem is here. Michelle K’s art and poem is here. Heidi’s poem is here, and Margaret’s poem is here. As more participants may trickle in through the weekend, please check back for more Peeps taking the terzanelle challenge.

Hope, a thing with feathers, is not on the ground, or being whipped about by the wind as feathers are. It’s perched, it’s clinging, and it’s singing, speaking up in that one tune-without-the-words. Perhaps that’s the only tune it knows. Maybe it’s only a single, rising note, not striving to be a symphony. A verb’s use is to predicate action. So in our own small ways, we can go and do likewise.

May your verb of hope flourish into determined doing, and so feed my five thousand and your five thousand, and on and on and echoing interminably, until that hope, harvested, nourishes and strengthens and empowers the soul – to armor up, and when we’ve done that, to make a stand.

Happy Weekend. Remember, you are so, so loved. ♥