Camille T. Dungy, poet

I am following a very short online course on meditation and writing led by someone I stumbled onto (on FB, of course), Nadia Colburn. It involves sitting very briefly (5 minutes), then she reads a poem as a prompt, and then you write, again very briefly. Altogether it's 15 minutes, something I know I'm capable of. Well, "following": I've been getting the emails the past five days, but did I actually check them out? No. Not until today, when I'm trying to do several of them, before they disappear. (Things do not stay on the internet forever.) And today's poem (session #2) is one I want to remember, so what better way than to share it here?

Characteristics of Life

     A fifth of animals without backbones could be at risk of extinction, say scientists.
     —BBC Nature News

Ask me if I speak for the snail and I will tell you
I speak for the snail.
                      speak of underneathedness
and the welcome of mosses,
                                   of life that springs up,
little lives that pull back and wait for a moment.

I speak for the damselfly, water skeet, mollusk,
the caterpillar, the beetle, the spider, the ant.
                                               I speak
from the time before spinelessness was frowned upon.

Ask me if I speak for the moon jelly. I will tell you
                     one thing today and another tomorrow
     and I will be as consistent as anything alive
on this earth.

                     I move as the currents move, with the breezes.
What part of your nature drives you? You, in your cubicle
ought to understand me. I filter and filter and filter all day.

Ask me if I speak for the nautilus and I will be silent
as the nautilus shell on a shelf. I can be beautiful
and useless if that's all you know to ask of me.

Ask me what I know of longing and I will speak distances
      between meadows of night-blooming flowers.
                                                I will speak
                   the impossible hope of the firefly.

                                       You with the candle
burning and only one chair at your table must understand
      such wordless desire.

                        To say it is mindless is missing the point.

Camille T. Dungy 

(The poem she read for the first session was Mary Oliver's "Praying," which I'd also like to remember and reread, but for now, a link will suffice. And now, back to session #2 and the actual writing practice.)