Appreciation

Wow!  What a wonderful thing this slice of life challenge has been!  I began with great trepidation, thinking “How am I going to fit in time to write every day?  I’m such a slow writer and I have no time as it is! And who would want to read anything I write anyway?”  But with encouragement from my friend, Linda, who showed me how to set up a blog, I started.  And now it’s finished!  And  I  am going to miss this community of writers and reading the daily snapshot of life on our planet that we create together.  What an antidote to the news you all have been; what a revelation, what a joy and a wonder it has been to read what you have written. Thank you!  Thank you!

 I think now I have a writing habit – and I will still sit here, in the pearl grey dawn of the mornings, writing.  I have new hope - maybe I will finish that novel! :-) Linda tells me that there is a Tuesday slice of life through the year, so we can wave at each other once a week.  I hope to see you all there!

And since today is the first day of poetry month, I would like to share one of my favorite poems:

Voyage

By Tony Hoagland

I feel as if we opened a book about great ocean voyages

And found ourselves on a great ocean voyage:

Sailing through December, around the horn of Christmas

and into the January Sea, and sailing on and on

in a novel without a moral but one in which

all the characters who died in the middle chapters

make the sunsets near the book's end more beautiful.

and someone is hanging a lantern from the stern,

and someone else says, "I'm only sorry

that I forgot my blue parka; It's turning cold."

Sunset like a burning wagon train

Sunrise like a dish of cantaloupe

Clouds like two armies clashing in the sky;

Icebergs and tropical storms,

That's the kind of thing that happens on our ocean voyage —

And in one of the chapters I was blinded by love

And in another, anger made us sick like swallowed glass

& I lay in my bunk and slept for so long,

I forgot about the ocean,

Which all the time was going by, right there, outside my cabin window.

And the sides of the ship were green as money,

and the water made a sound like memory when we sailed.

Then it was summer. Under the constellation of the swan,

under the constellation of the horse.

At night we consoled ourselves

By discussing the meaning of homesickness.

But there was no home to go home to.

There was no getting around the ocean.

We had to go on finding out the story

                                                by pushing into it —

The sea was no longer a metaphor.

The book was no longer a book.

That was the plot.

That was our marvelous punishment.