This week, Fran Haley and I are hosting the November Open Write at http://www.ethicalela.com. Come join us as we write poetry together. You can read Fran’s full prompt on the website along with the poems of others or the prompt only, here below.
Title: Belonging
Our Host
Fran Haley is a literacy educator with a lifelong passion for reading, writing, and dogs. She lives in the countryside near Raleigh, North Carolina, where she savors the rustic scenery and timeless spirit of place. She’s a pastor’s wife, mom of two grown sons, and the proud Franna of two granddaughters: Scout, age seven, and Micah, age two. Fran never tires of watching birds and secretly longs to converse with them (what ancient wisdom these creatures possess!). When she’s not working, serving beside her husband, being hands-on Franna, birding, or coddling one utterly spoiled dachshund, she enjoys blogging at Lit Bits and Pieces: Snippets of Learning and Life.
Inspiration
As Kim Johnson mentioned in yesterday’s Open Write: Come April, she and I will be honoring National Poetry Month by facilitating discussion of The Hurting Kind, the most recent book by current U.S. Poet Laureate Ada Limón (you can join us via Sarah Donovan’s new Healing Kind book club).
Let me linger a moment on the word healing. How often, how long, have we cried out for healing as individuals, families, communities, nations, humankind? When a group of students asked me what superpower I’d want most, that’s what I said. Healing. Oh, to lessen suffering, restore wholeness, impart peace…
In contemplating the despair and destruction of our times—of our human history, honestly—I cannot help picking up the inextricable thread of belonging. Think on this: How much pain stems from the need to belong? To know, to have, a safe place of being?
In a May 2022 interview with Angela María Spring of Electric Lit, Limón speaks of inspiration for The Hurting Kind: “We are all part of a community, we’re all connected. And sometimes we work so hard at trying to fit in somewhere to find our community, to figure out what it is that makes us connected…you’re already connected. You already have all that you need. And it’s in everything that’s come before you and it’s in everything that’s going to come after.”
That is the spirit of today’s poetry writing.
Process
Read Limón’s poem, “Ancestors”. Note that her images and metaphors are drawn from nature. She writes, exquisitely, of being from rocks, trees, and the “lacing patterns of leaves,” concluding with “I do not know where else I belong.” There are telling lines about roots and survival.
Considering the whole of your life: Which places impart the greatest sense of belonging to you? Why? Concentrate on details and possible symbolism of these settings. What’s the story? Which people are connected to these places? They’re often, but not always, family.
Try writing free verse or a prose poem incorporating these meaningful images, perhaps borrowing the phrases I’ve come here from and/or I do not know where else I belong.
Fran’s Poem
Origins
(after Ada Limón’s “Ancestors”)
I come here by way of the king’s river
a moody expanse, as vast as the sea
gray-green depths
with bell-topped red buoys
bobbing, bobbing
Right, red, returning
—a rite of passage
I’ve come here from bridges
yes, most of all from bridges
traversed by my predecessors
seeking livelihood
—did they ever encounter
bridges in their dreams
the way I have?
Distorted structures of dizzying heights
spanning waters at dead of night
absurd angles
impossible to navigate
I never think I can
but I always
find my way.
Like a pigeon, released
driven by some coding
deep in my DNA
I’ve forsaken the riverside
the mammoth steel cranes
the sound of buzz saws, rivet-guns,
metal striking metal
—over time, making a man
lose his hearing
to return, to roost
here in the dawn lands
where abandoned gray houses
and weathered-wood barns
sink decade by decade
into the earth
—for it always
takes back its own
where white-spotted fawns
guarded by their mothers
step like totems from sun-dappled woods
swelling with cicada chorus
—little living buzz saws
echoing, echoing in my blood
the generational song
—I don’t know
where else I belong.
Your Turn
Kim’s Poem
Ancestors Speak (inspired by Ada Limon’s Ancestors)
I’ve come here
from island and swamp
from Spanish Moss live oaks
from river and ocean
from marshland spartina
from cypress and mangrove
magnolia and black gum
Georgia roots running deep
all sunshine and black water
chaos and order
from hermit and hoarder
from ghosts that still speak
of lies that were spoken
of promises broken
of sermons not lived
the hard slap of truth
I don’t know
where else
I belong.
Common Threads 