Silence

I've mentioned before, I believe, my weekly generative poetry group, six to ten or so of us (I'm not sure our exact number) who meet on Thursday afternoons, read a selection of poems based on a particular theme, then spend half an hour creating our own poems based on that theme, and share them. I feel very brave to participate in this group—though I am (very) slowly beginning not to tell myself that "I am not a poet." As a friend in another poetry group reminds me, if you write poems, you are a poet. And yeah, I guess I write poems... Pretty much every week, in fact, if not more often. It's becoming a life-affirming practice of mine.

This week's prompt was silence. The featured poets included Rilke (in both German and English), Amy Lowell, a couple I hadn't heard of. I especially liked this take on the theme, by Billy Collins:

Silence

There is the sudden silence of the crowd

above a player not moving on the field,

and the silence of the orchid.

The silence of the falling vase

before it strikes the floor,

the silence of the belt when it is not striking the child.

The stillness of the cup and the water in it,

the silence of the moon

and the quiet of the day far from the roar of the sun.

The silence when I hold you to my chest,

the silence of the window above us,

and the silence when you rise and turn away.

And there is the silence of this morning

which I have broken with my pen,

a silence that had piled up all night

like snow falling in the darkness of the house—

the silence before I wrote a word

and the poorer silence now.

If we are true to the spirit of the exercise, we do not read the prompt poems beforehand, but just soak them up as we read aloud by turn and discuss as a group. Then, when it's time to write our own, whatever comes, comes. 

What came for me this Thursday was insomnia. Interesting, because I don't generally suffer from insomnia—but it was an easy enough place to go when thinking about silence. Our next sharer also wrote about sleeplessness, and getting back to sleep. This led to a general free-for-all of sharing of ALL our best insomnia pieces by email. It was funny and fun, and uniting. 

That's what poetry is so good at, and for: reminding us of all that we share. Ninety percent of our humanity. The dirty nasty awful political stuff is really only a small aspect of who we are. And yet lately, it feels like 90 percent. 

Poetry is my antidote.

(The orchid above is a very rare one from Florida, the Bahamas, and Cuba, Dendrophylax lindenii, or ghost orchid. It is pollinated by only a few sphinx moths and hawkmoths, and is endangered in the wild, while cultivation has proven very difficult. It is the subject of Susan Orlean's wonderful book The Orchid Thief—and, arguably, the movie Adaptation.)