If you wish to attend the read around (t’s free, fun, a great way to share, and reading a poem is optional). Note: If you registered already, you do not need to register again, simply use the link sent to you in your confirmation email. Register Here:

Next Read-Around is 2/8/2025 at 5:00 PM PST

How It Works:

  1. Read the poem 

  2. Do your own reflection on it, noting what it inspires in you

  3. Feel free to use your own reflection as your prompt or…

  4. Use the selection of prompts below

  5. Pick one that inspires you and write (feel free to use only one or write several poems using different prompts) or…

  6. Don’t use any of the provided prompts and follow your inspiration from wherever it comes

My Thoughts

I love poems addressed to the second person pronoun: You. It invites the reader to imagine someone from their own heart that relates. I recall a fallow period in my love life when I was in my twenties, lonely and desperate. I composed a series of poems entitled, A Lover’s Hindsight, capturing moments of intimacy with “you.” It changed my whole aura. I lost the desperation. I felt strangely, inevitably loved. I sang every love song addressed to “you” as if “you” sang with me in my car or we walked with our arms hooked into each other. I don’t know if angels really exist, but my heart believes it is so for it was as real as day to me. Lahab Assef Al-Jundi’s poem, Out Of The Mist, captures that same sentiment. Permit yourself to write (speak, dance, draw, etc.) to “You:” the intimate other with whom you can share anything and everything.

Out Of The Mist

Out of the mist of a million probable worlds,
Out of the dizziness of a long dream,

Like a bee that found its nectar in a field of stones,
Or a poet who hears his heart’s music amid cries of war;

The precision was that of divine intervention,
Art born of deeper beauty

And just like birds find home after a long winter,
And a smile finds its way to a melancholy face,

I found you.

Lahab Assef Al-Jundi
https://middleeasternliteraturejournal.wordpress.com/authors/assef-lahab-al-jundi-هب-عاصف-الجندي/

Prompt Ideas

  1. Journal or write a poem addressed to You, the intimate other, whether real of imagined, whether friend, lover, angel, god, teacher, student, or companion.

  2. Use the opening line from Al-Jundi’s poem as your prompt: Out of the mis tof a million worlds… Or use the second line, Outof the dizziness of a long dream… and free write whatever comes.

  3. Journal or write a poem about a time you heard your heat’s music. What do you do to hear your heart’s music even in troubling times?

  4. Journal or write a poem with instructions about how to reconnect with your Self or your essence.

  5. Journal or write a poem about how you “found” someone special in yor life. Or how someone special found you.

  6. Consider a time when you felt circumstances were guided by something akin to “divine intervention.” Journal orwrite a poem about it. Or use the topic of Divine Intervention.Do you beleive in it? What makes you think so or think not?

  7. As usual, write about anything else in the poem or in life that inspires you.