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 7/3/25 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

Entropy. It’s a law of physics. It's just a matter of time before things breakdown or wear out. The favorite shirt gets thread bare, burnt coffee in the mocha pot ruins the flavor, the washing machine starts leaking. It is just the way it is, and we are well-habituated to it in the era of planned obsolescence and a culture of discard. Even our aging bodies, from the perspective of western medical tradition, are inevitably in a process of degeneration. The best we can do is manage our symptoms and slow the decline. So, when poet Danusha Laméris finds her eyesight defying the odds and Improving, it prompts her to take her improved eyes, walk around town, and celebrate. And she writes a poem about how it opens a world of possibilities, which happens whenever an event “miraculously” breaks the rule of inevitability. There is a deeper metaphor embedded in her poem. If we look with “younger” eyes, we naturally see a world of possibilities. We notice things we might otherwise dismiss: the letters on a marquee, the delicate pattern of veins in a leaf. For me, when I catch the stride of those moments, I feel fulfilled by the presence of things, delighted by colors and shapes, by the inherent beauty even in the disarray of a garbage bin knocked over and spilling out like a cornucopia of waste. And, just as Laméris descirbes, I am bemused and entertained by the circus of my wandering thoughts, even the dark ones, which ride by erratically like clowns on a unicycle, juggling knives.

Improvement

The optometrist says my eyes
are getting better each year.
Soon he’ll have to lower my prescription.
What’s next? The light step I had at six?
All the gray hairs back to brown?
Skin taught as a drum?

My improved eyes and I
walked around town and celebrated.

We took in the letters
of the marquee, the individual leaves,
filling out the branches of the sycamore,
an early moon.

So much goes downhill: joints
wearing out with every mile,
the delicate folds of the eardrum,
exhausted from years of listening.
I’m grateful for small victories.

The way the heart still beats time
in the cathedral of the ribs.
And the mind, watching its parade
of thoughts, enter and leave,
begins to see them for what they are:
jugglers, fire swallowers, acrobats,
tossing their batons into the air.

by the Danusha Laméris
https://www.danushalameris.com/about

Prompt Ideas

  1. Journal or write a poem about a physical symptom that spontaneously improved.

  2. Journal or write a poem about an experience that opened up a world of possibilites to you.

  3. Take a stroll out in the world as if you are seeing through young eyes. What would 7 year old notice? An early teenager? A late teenager?

  4. Laméris describes imagining her gray hairs turn back to brown and her skin getting taut again as if she grows younger. Journal or write a poem about growing younger, physically, mentally, and emotionally.

  5. Write on the topic of “small victories,” whatever that might mean to you.

  6. Laméris describes how the heart “beats time in the cathedral of the ribs” metaphorically placing the heart in a holy place. The word beats has a double meaning here: it beats to a ryhthm in time or it beats time by defying it as in the act of growing younger. Journal or write a poem using that image of the heart in the cathedral rib and how it relates to time.

  7. Write about anything in the poem or in life that inspires you.