{pf: a summer swap surprise and the community is the point}

Welcome to Poetry Friday!

Poetry Peeps! Just a reminder that our challenge for the month of July is… the Sedoka. You’ll have a month to craft your creation(s), then share your offering on July 25th in a post and/or on social media with the tag #PoetryPals. We hope all of you will join the fun!

These last several weeks have been a bad combination of crazy busy and deeply fatigued as we’ve packed, moved, unpacked, and proceeded to do the summer hustle of enjoying visitors in between catching up on appointments. I knew with as much as I have going on that I wouldn’t have time to really make a good effort with the Summer Swap this season, so I bowed out of participating. Imagine my astonishment to receive – on the same day, no less – two poems from Poetry Friday stalwarts who nourished me with images and words of beauty and certainty. Linda Mitchell and Rose Cappelli gave me a spark of life this week, and I am deeply grateful. Muchísimas gracias, poets.

You can click on the image to enlarge it and see Linda’s handwritten invitation for me to ‘Begin Here,’ which was wrapped around a beautiful poem based on a Joy Harjo title (that woman has the best titles for her poetry collections!), and gaze greedily at the lacy water from the glorious fountains at Longwood Gardens, a place I clearly need to go and spend a whole week someday. (I think the postman read Rose’s poem as well, as he took an extra moment with her card before slipping it into our box. Poetry on postcards is a win for the world.)

I especially needed the kick in the bum Linda’s ‘junque’ journal provided (I cannot use her word, ‘junk,’ with any seriousness, even knowing this journals is made of bits and bobs from weeded library books, unused student notebook paper and prompt pages from the On Being summer project), because poetry in a time of busyness is hard, but poetry in a time of shrinking – and flinching – is nearly impossible.

When I was a child, I used to jump when the teacher raised her voice at other children. I cringed when my siblings were disciplined – or, let’s be real, punished. I don’t do well with… unkindness, and right now, there is just. so. much. I’ve been flinching like a dog recoiling from fireworks every time I read the news or hear a Morning Edition on NPR for weeks now. What did Adam Serwer tell us in 2018? The cruelty is the point… and it grinds down my soul like a cheese grater. When I read the first prompt from Krista Tippet, asking what brought me despair and what brought me hope, I could answer at least half of the question reflexively.

I was privileged to do a poetry exercise with the exceptional poet-teacher Michelle Schaub the other day, focusing on figurative language and metaphors. Using Quilts by Nikki Giovanni as a mentor poem, we discussed the effect of the metaphor in comparison, but also in contrast. Once I decided to use an extended metaphor in this week’s poem, I knew I needed to figure out ways to shed light on opposite themes. If hope is a thing with feathers, then what thing is it not? If what is filling me with despair is cruelty, what is giving me hope? I was stuck on that hope bit for an annoyingly long time.

Rereading the beginning of the Atlantic piece gave me an inkling. It’s in the rather grisly beginning, where Serwer recounts what he calls the “catalog of cruelty” found at The Museum of African-American History and Culture through photographs, not so much of the deaths of African Americans, but the unhinged, grinning glee of their murderers. He writes, “Their names have mostly been lost to time. But these grinning men were someone’s brother, son, husband, father. They were human beings, people who took immense pleasure in the utter cruelty of torturing others to death—and were so proud of doing so that they posed for photographs with their handiwork, jostling to ensure they caught the eye of the lens, so that the world would know they’d been there. Their cruelty made them feel good, it made them feel proud, it made them feel happy. And it made them feel closer to one another.” Et voila. What gives me hope, and what has always given me hope as an adult with still such an incomplete understanding of the word, is community. That gathering around and embracing of a shared ideology. That source of collaboration, assistance, understanding, camaraderie. That thing which, for much of my younger years was simply an abstract, but which, as I have stepped away from the rigid isolation I grew up in, I’m beginning to find the shape of… Community is what both the cruel and the compassionate are seeking.

The community didn’t make it very far into today’s poem except in the envoi. Cousin Mary Lee’s fourth of July poetry prompt seemed to me to be for protest and resistance, not necessarily collaboration and coming together. I’ll circle back to this another day, but for now, this is a day for history to remind us of a two-fold truth: this IS who some of us are, and who some of us want to be – and the rest of us who don’t want this? Will reach out to their neighbors, circle up the wagons, and resist.

4TH OF JULY 2025

Looking back, THE
history books will show
how, six months in, CRUELTY
has not plateaued.
My country as it IS
I do not know.
We once fought hate, we THE
shield of small and slow.
But now, axe sharpened to a POINT
The fascist thinks to deal out a death blow.

Though cruelty is some people’s way of life
Together we are strong, even through strife.

Whether or not you protest or party today, know that the tiny thread of connection in all people is our need for community. What are the ways that you can gather in strength and strengthen others? What are the ways that you in particular can use a passion or a skill particular to you to pour oil, bind wounds, or strengthen the courage of your community? I know I’ll be thinking of the answer to those questions myself this Fourth. If you’d like to continue to think in nuanced ways about this complicated and confusing country we call home, and read more poetry of protest and praise on its birthday, head over to A(nother) Year of Reading, and thanks, Mary Lee for hosting.

Be well, friends, and do good.