This month Women Writing for (a) Change-Bloomington poets are participating in National Poetry Writing Month. Every day we will offer up a new poem by a writer in our community. Check back after 6:00pm for the Prompt of the Day and the selected resulting poem.
Today’s prompt asks you to engage in another kind of cross-cultural exercise, as it is inspired by the work of Sei Shonagon, a Japanese writer who lived more than 1000 years ago. She wrote a journal that came to be known as The Pillow Book. In it she recorded daily observations, court gossip, poems, aphorisms, and musings, including lists with titles like “Things That Have Lost Their Power,” “Adorable Things,” and “Things That Make Your Heart Beat Faster.” Today, I’d like to challenge you to write your own Sei Shonagon-style list of “things.”
Day 9 Things I carry from those who have died by Tracy Zollinger Turner
My grandfather’s dark, surgical humor
My grandmother’s bottomless anxiety and knack for on-the-spot rhymes
Together, their pre-dawn birthday morning phone calls, every year, every grandchild
Linda’s acceptance of and joy in parenting an only child
Diana’s regard for her son and mine; the way she encouraged our boys to go ahead and explore esoteric imaginary worlds and real-life mudholes – but also her tendency to continually break her own heart until it no longer happened figuratively
My Indiana grandfather’s absence; the complicated legacy that he left for my father at fifteen
My stepfather’s love of poetry and music, without all the canonical limitations
Aunt Debbie’s unrepentant love of motherhood, entertaining, and the Christmas tree ornament that Joan Rivers sent to her
My Indiana grandmother’s mental illness, especially the heavy weight it cast on my father
The way Aunt Diana would hold on to me and sway when we visited her; some imaginary music our means of communication
Michael’s joy in the dharma and compassion for people harmed by the addictions of loved ones
Paul’s pursuit of emotional sobriety and fiery twitchiness about the billionaire Koch brothers
Abby’s wickedly clever humor (even about her metastatic breast cancer), the kind way she texted me when I was grieving, the obituary that she wrote for herself, identifying unapologetically as the blissed-out, all-in mother of three girls
My great-grandmother’s large, pendulous breasts, ample enough to fling backwards, over her shoulders
Samson’s sense of total abandon while running in the woods, his tongue hanging out sideways, looking like a red-gold coyote trickster
My former mother-in-law’s unselfconscious use of homey midwestern (but unusual) observations like “that little boy is a perfectly straight line from the top of his head all the way down to the bottom of his feet”
The enthusiasm of Andyman’s full-bodied hugs and his willingness to turn toward the grieving
The way Stephanie held my hand and said “warm,” her liberal use of the word “Monkey” in ASL when children were present, and the deaf name her friends gave my son
Uncle Don’s unwitting survival in the face of campsite hippopotamuses while in remission from blood cancer
Ms. J’s inspiringly messy grace, willingness to tell people they are loved when she saw they felt unlovable, and her endless, hard-won wisdom about how to cope with painful things, cropped into pithy maxims like “find it, feel it, face it, heal it”