Fran Haley of North Carolina and I are the hosts of this month’s Open Write at http://www.ethicalela.com, and we are on our third and final day of October’s prompts. Hop over to check out today’s poems later in the day to read the poems this prompt inspires.
Fran Haley is a K–12 literacy educator who coordinates elementary programs centered on a love of books and the joy of reading aloud. She helps young writers find their voices on the page in creative ways. A pastor’s wife, mom, and Franna of two spirited granddaughters, she savors the quiet rhythms of rural life near Raleigh, NC. The pre-dawn hours are Fran’s sacred writing time; you can find her there in the stillness, seated at the kitchen table with a sleeping puppy in her lap. She authors the blog Lit Bits and Pieces: Snippets of Learning and Life.
Kim Johnson is the District Literacy Specialist for her rural school district in Zebulon, Georgia. She grew up a preacher’s kid (P.K.) and is a mom and grandmother who enjoys weekend glamping with her husband and three schnoodles in State Parks. Kim enjoys writing during Open Writes each month and blogs at Common Threads: Patchwork Prose and Verse.
Inspiration
Fran: While searching for ideas, I came across this fun article, 75 Best Tea Quotes and Captions. Something here may call to your poet-heart. I also encountered a phrase I hadn’t heard before: “More tea vicar.” Now, that’s just begging to be in a poem…
Kim: A telephone conversation with my aunt about a family member’s messy breakup over foreseeable differences led her to conclude with this phrase: he wasn’t reading the tea leaves. This has stuck with me for years, and I think often about all the ways we read the world – and how we respond to it.
Process
Pour a cup of tea and write with us today! Let the pen lead you to a poem ~ perhaps it’s a play on words with -tea or tea- or -ity, or maybe it’s a memory of a cup of tea with someone you love. Maybe it’s the clinking of cups on saucers that takes you to a memory of a meal – or a place. Or perhaps it’s a phrase someone has used – More tea, Vicar or reading the tea leaves – that inspires your poem today. Come have tea with us, and steep in the joy of poetry today!
Fran and Kim’s Poems
Fran:
A Spot o’ Tea
“More tea, Vicar?” asked Mrs. Krupp, tipping her pot o’er his empty cup.
He’d barely sipped when she leaned in with glee:
“Now, dear Vicar, go on…spill the tea!”
Deacon Blythe…and Mrs. Montague?! Rumors steeped like fresh morning brew, stirred in pews of St. Tempest-by-the-Sea— ah, the unholy communion of sipping hot tea!
Kim:
-tea party
such vitriolic, hateful glares
when toxic dreams become nightmares
when tearful wake-up calls come clear
about those whom we hold so dear
who are these people in disguise
who scorn us with deceiving eyes
whose poison stench of mockery
reeks truth of trust’s reali-ty?
they’re mother, father, sibling, friend~
relationships we nurture, tend
whose revelations, suddenly,
cast doubt on rooted certain-ty
and so it goes with politics
religion and its heretics
that peace we seek, that uni-ty is really up to us, we see
It’s the theme of this trip- fireside stories. We’re sharing memories and telling stories, and even the youngest kids are getting in on the action. One of the best story generators I’ve ever seen for all ages is Campfire Stories Deck for Kids.
We’ve all been playing. Each storyteller takes a character card (a clumsy fox, a talkative bison, a gassy whale) and an action card (finds a treasure in the desert, accidentally pulls the drain at the bottom of the ocean, jumps into a cloud from a mountaintop). One grandchild laughed so hard telling his story we could hardly understand him. We’ve all had the belly giggles from listening and envisioning the scenes.
Each night of the trip has been full of stories, and we can’t wait to tell more!
On the first night of the trip, I got Sawyer to share the theme of this year’s trip since the gathering we had in June was sad for everyone. We wanted to shift the grief of our Dad and Papa to togetherness and fun by telling old stories by the fire and making new memories as we get out and go adventuring. And so our theme is……
Sawyer revealed our
family mountain trip theme:
Fireside Stories! (Shirts)
Sawyer shares the theme for this year’s trip: Haynes Family Fireside Stories 2025
Our cooks for the first night ~ Briar and Andrew
Silas kicks back in the porch swing
Cousins reunite and share their own little stories
Kitchen fun
Sunset on Day 1
Rule #1: Never think that kids will wait to decorate the pumpkins. More on that later.
This month, I continue writing posts from prompts in the Writing Down the Bones Card Deck by Natalie Goldberg, shared with me by my friend Barb Edler of Iowa. I’m continuing this month so that I can experience the entire deck of prompts. Today’s prompt asks: what moment in history affected you the most?
This month, I continue writing posts from prompts in the Writing Down the Bones Card Deck by Natalie Goldberg, shared with me by my friend Barb Edler of Iowa. I’m continuing this month so that I can experience the entire deck of prompts. Today’s prompt asks where we have traveled, even if it is just down the street.
It’s been a while since I’ve had morning coffee over an Ada Limón book, so this morning, that’s where I’m traveling. I’m using Instructions on Not Giving Up as a mentor poem for my poem about traveling today. As they say of travel, “Birds have wings; humans have books.”
Instructions on Traveling the World
more than the elusive green and Seine of Paris, a city
of concrete and stone, more than the Thames rushing by
The Tower, more than the Spree and its bridge of love locks, it’s
the early morning steam rising off the quaint rural ponds
that really gets to me. When darkness clocks out
and the world is still, you can see the wispy white nightgowns –
those sheer ones that seem to float – hanging onto the
threads of the night waters. Flowing, fading, an ethereal mist
takes shape, vanishing into all assurance of another place
and promise of return. Fine, then, I’ll take it, my soul seems
to say, embracing faith that this is how the cycle works
across the globe, transcending Heaven and Earth as I grasp the truth
of it, finally: it’s not about where my body goes, but where my
This month, I continue writing posts from prompts in the Writing Down the Bones Card Deck by Natalie Goldberg, shared with me by my friend Barb Edler of Iowa. I’m continuing this month so that I can experience the entire deck of prompts. Today’s prompt asks to tell our stories of love.
Perhaps there is no better day for this prompt than today, the day of the wedding of my college roommate and best friend’s younger daughter, Sarah. Stacey and Keith Jackson and their two daughters are friends who have been there through it all with my family, and ours with theirs. College, graduations, losses of parents, births of children, vacations together, my divorce and relocation to live closer them and then my remarriage (Stacey found the love of my life when my first attempt failed), kids’ weddings, and grandchildren. There’s been more love in this strong friendship than there is in many families. And this is why this day is so special and meaningful.
I left work early yesterday after a tough meeting, feeling drained and not knowing whether there was a single smile left in me. I wasn’t sure how I was going to get through the wedding rehearsal, hoping the headache I was feeling behind my left eye was not another onset of vertigo. I pulled through Chick Fil A and got a real Coca Cola, the one with caffeine, to try to help stave it off, and I did a few eye exercises the way I’ve been taught. I pulled up my GPS to get to Forest Hill Park in Perry, Georgia – – one hour and 18 minutes south. The sun was lowering itself in the sky on my right, and the chill in the crisp fall air with a few leaves beginning to turn tuned my heart back to the right station in my silent car. I wanted it that way after the long meeting. Silence is truly as golden as the sunset, and I needed to do all I could to calm my mind and shift gears back to what truly matters.
I turned the years back through my mind, to the days of helping my own mother, a pastor’s wife, coordinate weddings since I was 7 years old, the year I won second place at the local airport’s 1973 Christmas Flower Show only because she guided my hands and told me where to stick the greenery and each flower. She taught me a little about floral design, she showed me how she met with brides to prepare catered meals, she showed me how to use a hot glue gun and attach Galax leaves to an entire tablecloth when a bride wanted the venue to look like a forest with the huge cake sitting on that table, and she taught me how to be aware when the lights needed dimming or the train needed straightening. Her company, Elegant Thymes, offered the full package of wedding services, right down to the preacher and the church. Mom’s voice speaks and nudges quite presently from Heaven at weddings.
Just a few years ago, it seemed, Stacey and I were making table arrangements and bridesmaids’ bouquets for Sarah’s first wedding, and then using golf tees for attendant placement in my absence as I directed her other daughter Hannah’s wedding rehearsal a few years later from the road on my way to Pascagoula, Mississippi. Since I couldn’t get there in person for that rehearsal, I’d sketched a diagram and suggested using golf tees in the ground to help position the wedding party. It worked, and she pulled it off beautifully as I made my way in time for her to pass the baton to me for the big day. We have always worked as a team that way.
We didn’t have to use golf tees last night. I left work early enough to get there, meet the groom’s side of the family, and have a few minutes to catch up before the rehearsal began. There’s a steeple and an altar in the small park, and a covered bridge that brides cross to walk down the bricked path to the altar. The ladies get dressed in an old train car, while the men go into the old church-turned-wedding-venue and remain in their designated place until time to join two hearts into the forever kind of love everyone hopes to find someday.
Sarah and Brian have found theirs, and it’s as real and palpable, as certain as the sun setting behind the steeple beneath which they will take their vows this evening at 5:30. You see, this couple knows about commitment. Brian has two sons he and Sarah have committed to raising, one with severe Cerebral Palsy. The other, so polite and helpful, is his Best Man. From the time I arrived, I saw Brian making every consideration for his son in his wheelchair and for Sarah, who has a degenerative muscular disease and knows that his arm will be there for her every step of the journey ahead. What you or I might consider a challenge, they embrace joyfully and gratefully as their life —and they have committed to it and will live it together in love.
From this day forward. For better or worse. For richer for poorer, in sickness and in health, as long as they both shall live.
Every wedding director knows there is no right way and no wrong way to “do” a wedding. We tend to start in the middle with placement, then run through the recessional, run through a processional, and then recess a final time to be sure everyone is comfortable. We remind the groomsmen to clasp their hands in front, bridesmaids to hold bouquets just above their waist so the pictures look great. We take note of the sun’s position and the weather report if it’s an outdoor wedding. Stacey calls it “herding cats.” We check with the bride on all decisions, and humorously but seriously remind the groom that the first rule of marriage is learning to listen to the bride, and that it’s all been practice until the wedding, and then it’s officially signed onto paper, so he’d better be ready. We all laugh.
But last night, the groom stepped in with his own request I wasn’t expecting. The walkway to the altar is on the right side of the chairs leading up to the steeple – there is no “middle aisle.” Brian asked to flip tradition and bring the bridesmaids to the right side, groomsmen on the left, to make it easier for his bride to navigate her journey to the altar. My heart melted. Why hadn’t I seen that??
I knew right then: he is THE ONE for our Sarah. Not only is he so completely in love with her that you can see it in his eyes every time he beholds her, but he is also tender in his care of her. He knows what commitment means, and his “I Do” is the forever kind that will carry his family forward through the years, into the togetherness that isn’t afraid to ask to throw out tradition when it comes to what’s best for them. God has winked in the most loving way on our sweet Sarah, on her groom, and on this new young family.
Commitment with tenderness, always self-sacrificing, is the truest kind of love there is, and I will be there with a Kleenex, grateful to be in the shadows of the trees back by the old covered bridge, directing the wedding of my truest-ever friend’s daughter and her new husband, ready to embrace life and love in a deeper way than most of us may ever know.
A Toast
to life
to love
to Sarah and Brian
as they begin
their new life
together
This will be the sun’s position at 5:30 today, Sarah and Brian’s wedding day, as they take their vows at Forest Hill Park in Perry, Georgia.
The flower show trophy from 1973 – my first training experience that prepared me to work by Mom as she coordinated weddings and events
My father died June 13 after a long battle with Pulmonary Fibrosis, Colorectal Cancer, and Prostate Cancer. We are nearly four months into life without him, and yet the grief my brother and I have experienced has been an emotional roller coaster of shock, anger, and sadness compounded by the physical tasks of wrapping up his unfinished business and cleaning his house and seven storage rooms.
You read that right. Seven storage rooms.
Mom died ten years ago, and she’d been the glue. Once she was no longer here, his cord came unraveled. He would not allow others – especially his own children – to help him divest himself of his belongings, and he did not know how to handle these things alone – even though he insisted he did and promised time and again that he would.
Oh, how he was stubborn! He bought a car against the advice of the mechanic inspecting it (all because he’d lost the keys to the one he drove). He fired the housekeeper that his doctor strongly urged him to hire and keep after only one visit – reluctantly managing the hiring, but not the keeping.
We struggled to find compassion for Dad when he wouldn’t listen – and frustration lingers as my brother and I have had to bring our own lives to a screeching halt to try to clean up the mess he would not allow us to touch before school started back, which would have allowed a better pace and less racing against the clock to avoid additional monthly storage fees.
I’ll admit: I felt a certain smug satisfaction when a huge limb fell on his new car and knocked the side view mirror off, proving that the repair bills on that make and model would be far more than we knew he wanted to spend after he’d told us sternly that we were just wrong. I delighted in the concierge doctor who did more than suggest that the boxes stacked against the door of the guest room were a fire hazard and that the condition of the home warranted a housekeeper.
We came to places of disbelief, watching him do things no person in their right mind would do. Once we realized he wasn’t in his right mind, we developed what little compassion we could muster.
It was hard to feel compassion for our father, who seemed to be working against us at every turn.
Ephesians 4:32 says be kind and compassionate to one another, forgiving each other, just as in Christ God forgave you. How many times has God watched me make mistakes, deliberately and willfully, and then forgiven me with grace and mercy? I needed to extend grace to my earthly father the way my Heavenly Father has so freely offered it to me for 59 years. Even though compassion isn’t listed as one of the nine fruits of the Spirit in Galatians, I’m pretty sure it’s an offshoot fruit, like a secondary or tertiary fruit in the complete rainbow sherbet of spiritual fruits.
Feelings of guilt and regret emerged as we watched our father lying at peace in his Hospice bed, breathing machine as loud and obnoxious as an after-storm generator in a total power loss. I took photos of our hands holding his, so still against the backdrop of the snow white sheets. There was silence without peace, sleep without rest, stillness without calm in all the trademark ways that grief works.
I grappled with my lack of compassion when it mattered – and will carry some of that regret for the rest of my life. I was not as tactful and understanding as I could have been while Dad was still alive. But I take comfort that I held presence in those final weeks, burning sick and bereavement days at work to be with him. I invited his stories of the good old days, recorded them, and took interest in them. I offered words of thankfulness and pride in him, making our peace at the bitter end of a long road.
….still I wonder:
how far down the road
is self-forgiveness
and how does regret
over the absence
of compassion
get resolved?
I’m asking my Spiritual Journey friends for your stories and insights on compassion today. Please share your links to your blogs below. If you do not have a blog, please share your experiences and stories in the comments.
This month, I continue writing posts from prompts in the Writing Down the Bones Card Deck by Natalie Goldberg, shared with me by my friend Barb Edler of Iowa. I’m continuing this month so that I can experience the entire deck of prompts. The prompt today is inspired by a question in Brother, I’m Dying asked by one of Edwidge Danticat’s brothers of his father after he tells his children he has a fatal disease. Goldberg asks us to answer that same question, honestly – to do an honest assessment.
I’ve chosen a shape poem today, also called a concrete poem since it takes the form of a tangible object or symbol shape. So here’s a lamp to shed a little truth on the answer to the question today.
This month, I continue writing posts from prompts in the Writing Down the Bones Card Deck by Natalie Goldberg, shared with me by my friend Barb Edler of Iowa. I’m continuing this month so that I can experience the entire deck of prompts. Today’s prompt is to tell about a body of water with which you are familiar. What comes to mind is the creek that ran through the back yard of our honeymoon house years ago.
Today’s host for the last day of September’s Open Write at http://www.ethicalela.com is my friend Barb Edler of Iowa. Barb and I have collaborated on several writing projects together over the past decade, most recently our book entitled Assessing Students with Poetry Writing Across Content Areas: Humanizing Formative Assessment, published Taylor & Francis, a division of Routledge Press, released earlier this month. We write together the first Monday of each month in a small Zoom group and share what is happening in our lives. She’s the friend who shared with me the cards I’ve been using from Natalie Goldberg’s Writing Down the Bones. You can read her full prompt here today, as she inspires us to choose any text or piece of art and write about it. She models an extended Fibonacci Sequence poem form using syllable counts 1,1,2,3,5,8 forward and reverse and I’m doing the same today with the same poem I used yesterday to inspire my writing ~ Overheard on a Salt Marsh by Harold Monro. Hop on over to the prompt link later in the day to read the poems others have written!
Common Threads 