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 5/22/25 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

This time of year, in California days, the fierce sun beats the afternoon into submission. The air so still I can hear a dragonfly flapping its wings. I can watch the spore orb of dandelion waiting in its transparency to be picked, to be whisked away on the wind. And I can feel the heat pressing against my skin like the walls of a shrinking room as my body cries for rest, but the calendar says, “Go-go-go,” perpetually leaning towards an untouchable horizon. Even the names of things lay themselves down in the shadows, half empty: a book, a cup, a bench. Even the birds go quiet, standing on the wire, the sky left wide open, gaping. That’s the kind of moment Octavio Paz captures in his poem, Between Leaving and Staying: the world poised in stasis and everything in a stupor, neither asleep nor awake. The question of leaving or staying evaporates like heat waves rising from the asphalt and dogs pant with tongues out in the shade. I think of all the rhythms the body knows that we have beaten into submission to keep life at bay. Then, the afternoon comes when life is already a bay and the body remembers the quiet motions that rock the world, dropping the need to have an answer to the question, “Why are we here?”  We merely are. We merely stay. And then the moment falls from itself, pulling us through the eye of the needle back into the go-go-go of our calendared world.

Between Leaving And Staying

A solid transparency, the day
is caught between leaving and staying,

all of it seen, but elusive,
the horizon an untouchable nearness.

Papers on the table, a book, a glass –
things rest in the shadow of their names.

The blood in my vein rises more and more slowly
and repeats its obstinate syllable within my temples.

The light makes no choices now changing a wall
that merely exists in time without history.

The afternoon spreads, is already a bay;
its quiet motions are rocking the world.

We are neither asleep nor awake:
we merely are merely stay.

The moment is falling from itself, pausing,
becoming the passage through which we continue

—Octavio Paz
Translated from Spanish by Mark Strand
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/octavio-paz

Prompt Ideas

  1. Journal or write a poem about a conflict between staying and leaving. Either when you wanted to stay, but felt you had to leave; or you wanted to leave, but felt you had to stay

  2. Journal or Write a poem about the untouchable nearness of an elusive horizon; about a desire or a goal that seems always just beyond your reach.

  3. Pause uses the phrase, things rest in the shadow of their names. Write a poem about the shadow of names; or about the relationship between names and the things named.

  4. Journal or write about a time when you felt yourself lulled into a stupor by the afternoon heat.

  5. What gets your blood flow to quicken or slow? What obstinate syllable might your blood pulse through you when it has slowed enough to hear it?

  6. Journal or write about a time near a lake or a bay when it felt as if the quiet motion of the water was gently rocking the world. Or write about any time when you seemed to be or move in harmony with the rhythms of the body.

  7. Write about a time, or imagine a time, when you have no need to answer the question why are you here? When you “merely are. Merely stay.“

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