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 5/29/25 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

We call them strays, whether a runaway, lost, or abandoned, prowling the streets. Sometimes it’s heartbreaking, sometimes frightening, like the rabid dog stories I was told as a child, foaming at the mouth. If they bite, you could die in two weeks. Elizabeth Alexander‘s poem, Stray, starts out with a family on a beach as the anxious narrator sees a hungry-looking stray dog charging towards them. After nothing happens, one of the children  asks a poignant question: is there such a thing as a stray child? Stray, in this case, means without a guardian. That’s a telling point. Because stray can mean to wander; to veer off the path, which is in our nature. We are drawn to places only found by straying. But in this case, stray means you don’t have an owner and protector. No one to claim you. When the naked loneliness of that hits you, it can stir up every conceivable anxiety. To be without a home base is the most desperate kind of freedom. That’s the difference between being a stray and the act of straying.  Straying means you have a base to return to, someone or something that calls you home.  This is what makes the man’s commentat the end, I was a stray before I met you, so poignant.

Stray

On the beach, close to sunset, a dog runs
toward us fast, agitated, perhaps feral,
scrounging for anything he can eat.
We pulled the children close and let him pass.

Is there such a thing as a stray child? Simon asks.
like if a mother had a child from her body,
but then decided she wanted to be a different child’s mother,
what would happen to that first child?

The dog finds a satisfying scrap and calms.
The boys break free and leap from rock to rock.
I was a stray man before I met your mother,
you say, but they have run on and cannot hear you.

How fast they run on, past the dark pool
your voice makes, our arms which hold them back.
I was a stray man before I met you,
you say this time you are speaking to me.

—Elizabeth Alexander
http://www.elizabethalexander.net

Prompt Ideas

  1. Journal or write a poem about an encounter with a stray animal.

  2. Journal or write a poem from the perspective of a stray animal.

  3. Journal or write a poem about homelessness.

  4. Write about discarded things that may be found in antique stores or thrift shops.

  5. Write about the act of straying; of veering off path. What gets you to stray? Consider straying as an act of curiosity versus straying as an act of rebellion. What people, places, or things do you return to and keep you from being a stray?  

  6. Alexander’s poem subtly celebrates the man’s belonging to his partner and to his family, highlighted by contrast to a stray dog and his own past. Write about belonging: your own sense of it; the pleasures and pitfalls of belonging.

  7. Journal or write a poem about “ownership.” How does it change your reationship to a thing or activity when you “own” it: your home, your job, a particular task? How do you think differently of a person when you use the possessive as in “my friend” versus the more abstract “a friend.”

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