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Rewrite your first post

Poetry, Writing
we called it Whale Beach.

we called it Whale Beach.

I am using the daily prompt from yesterday:

Now that you’ve got some blogging experience under your belt, re-write your very first post.

First, I want to take this opportunity to say that my blog is going to be TEN YEARS OLD on January 27, 2013. I am cooking up something in celebration and I will let you know in due time what that will be. But for now, here is my first post (from January 27th, 2003) rewritten as a pantoum.

R. and I took a drive up the coast yesterday.
It was so rejuvenating.
We went to one of our favorite beaches.
I don’t know the name of the beach but it is very beautiful.

It was so rejuvenating.
There are lots of rocks jutting up from the ocean.
I don’t know the name of the beach but it is very beautiful.
Yesterday the waves were huge!

There are lots of rocks jutting up from the ocean.
I felt so full of energy and hope.
Yesterday the waves were huge!
I don’t ever want to leave this place.

I felt so full of energy and hope.
I love living here.
I don’t ever want to leave this place.
Expensive it is and hard to get by.

I love living here.
We went to one of our favorite beaches.
Expensive it is and hard to get by.
R. and I took a drive up the coast yesterday.

The Missing Mountain

Writing

Ghost Mountain
Note: I found my old Moleskine journal. I have had it since 2004! And it still isn’t filled up. Here is an entry from February 4, 2010. It is interesting to read retrospectively. 

I am sitting in my office and I am watching cars drive hurriedly past my window, swooshing through the puddles the rain is creating. The rain comes down heavily and the sky is gray and dark. I feel like I haven’t seen blue sky in weeks. I haven’t seen Mt. Hood in weeks, even though I live in its shadow. The people driving by are driving home to Portland having spent the day on the mountain but I can’t see it because it is covered in clouds.

I think about how my heart skips a beat when I drive to  Welches on a clear day and the massive peak appears from behind the trees in all her wondrous glory. I smile at her beauty. I feel honored and blessed to be living here and to be able to see this on my way to work.

I think about last summer when Raf and I stayed at Timberline Lodge. I think about the evening I walked alone up the path to the Pacific Crest Trail and basked in the beauty of the fields of alpine Lupines. I stood there, looking at them in awe, and it was so quiet that I could hear the buzzing of hundreds of bumble bees. I stood still and enjoyed that moment and I felt totally and completely happy.

I miss that feeling . I am missing Mt. Hood. I’m tired of the rain and clouds and gray. I want to witness her magnificence again.

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The Santa Cruz Monica

Poetry

Sometimes I wonder
If there is another me
who still lives in Santa Cruz.
The Santa Cruz Monica.
The me who chose to be
A creative writing major at UCSC.
She had guts.
She is the one who runs on the beach at sunrise.
She is the one who surfs The Hook.
She is the one who Is not afraid
Of wasps’s nests as she rappels
The cliff at Castle Rock.
She is the one who
Writes stories about the Sea.
I can feel her when I visit.
Her happy soul bleeds
Through the crack in our worlds.

 

A man and a woman held hands on the way down

Writing

The image from 9/11 that is forever seared in my consciousness:

 

Two figures are suspended in the air holding hands
The tie on one of them flips up into his face
And his arm is outstretched
As if he is trying to grab hold of  the wind.
The other figure is wearing high heels
and a pencil skirt.
Her long hair defies gravity.
They are holding hands.
As they fall 106 floors
To the building’s plaza
On the ground.

Commentary on this that is worth reading:

A couple leaped from the South Tower, hand in hand. They reached for each other and their hands met and they jumped. So many people saw this as a scar burned onto our brains. But a man reached for a woman’s hand and she reached for his hand, and they jumped out the window holding hands. I try to whisper prayers for the sudden dead and the harrowed families of the dead and the screaming souls of the murderers, but I keep coming back to his hand in her hand, nestled in each other with such extraordinary, ordinary, naked love. It is the most powerful prayer I can imagine, the most eloquent, the most graceful. It is everything that we are capable of against horror and loss and tragedy. It is what makes me believe that we are not fools to believe in God, to believe that human beings have greatness and holiness within them like seeds that open only under great fire, to believe that who we are persists past what we were, to believe against evil evidenced hourly that love is why we are here. – Brian Doyle. 

I wrote a short story about this that I might share sometime, if I can find the courage to.

Write a poem about an animal

Poetry

I just discovered this: NaPoWriMo, in which you write a poem everyday! I am super sad that I missed out on starting this on April 1st. But I think I will follow the rest of the prompts. It’s a good way to excercise that part of my brain. I probably won’t post everything that I write, but perhaps,  if I am feeling brave, I will post some of it.

Today’s prompt is to write a poem about an animal. I didn’t write anything – yet. But I found one that I wrote last summer when I was going through a poetry writing bender. I was working through a fabulous book called Writing Poetry from the Inside Out. The author suggests using “Poem sketches.” These are four words that you use to form the skeleton of your poem. You choose the four words intuitively and then write the poem around those words.

The poems from these exercises are in no way finished, and in fact, I will probably go in today and play around with this one. But I thought it might be fun to share, especially since birds are featured in the poem.

I have thought about birds a lot lately.  I get up before dawn everyday and have enjoyed hearing the sunrise (as opposed to seeing it). When the sun rises I can hear a beautiful symphony of birds singing outside and it makes my heart happy.

The words for this poem sketch were: Ecstasy, Garments, Linger, Dawn. I wrote it the morning after a lightening storm, the one that caused Mt. Hood to catch on fire, actually.

The flashes of light
From the sky at dawn
Linger in my head.
The birds wear their
New wet garments
As they sing their songs
About the ecstasy of being.

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