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 8/14/25 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

I have worked for years at a full acceptance of myself, my life, and my circumstances, but I have yet to arrive at a total embrace. I still grapple with the untowards, still rattle my saber at inconveniences, still hide my face with secret shames. I know the focus on pinpointed goals dismisses the wide wonder of the world, bottlenecks my energy flow , and turns it into a fire hose. In emotional calculus, there are many more unwanted ways for the world to go than the conditions we place on it. There is a thin edge where our precious efforts commingle and clash with life.  Fortunately, our daily calamities are usually small—an unwanted intrusion, a thwarting, a necessary detour, a depression, a meanness, a momentary lapse—tiny fires which we often snuff out by bringing in the whole fire brigade and turning it on ourselves. These are a few of my thoughts for this week prompts, which come from two short poems: Wendell Berry’s To Know The Dark and Jane Hirshfield’s A Cedary Fragrance. Both skirt the edges of life, and gently, but powerfully, take us to that gritty border, the often irritating whetstone against which we either rub our dull, blunt selves raw or sharpen ourselves for the task of living.

To Know the Dark

To go in the dark with a light is to know the light.
To know the dark, go dark. Go without sight,
and find that the dark, too, blooms and sings,
and is traveled by dark feet and dark wings.

— Wendell Berry
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/wendell-berry

A Cedary Fragrance

Even now,
decades after,
I wash my face with cold water—

Not for discipline,
nor memory,
nor the icy, awakening slap,

but to practice
choosing
to make the unwanted wanted.

—Jane Hirshfield
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/jane-hirshfield

Both poems from: Anonymous. Poetry Is Not a Luxury: Poems for All Seasons (Kindle Version)

Prompt Ideas

  1. Journal or write a poem titled or starting with the prompt: Go Dark. What does that mean to you. How would you “go dark?”

  2. Berry’s poem claims the dark blooms and sings, Journal or write a poem about what blooms and what sings in the dark. Or use the prompt: In the dark… and describe what you find there.

  3. Imagine you travel through darkness “with dark feet and dark wings.” Journal or write a poem embodying that experience.

  4. Jane Hirshfield titles her poem A Cedary Fragrance because she attended a zen retreat in a cedar forest decades earlier that included a ritual of washing her face in cold water. The phrase is used to describe anything that has a woody fragrance and is often used to describe wine aged in wooden barrels. Journal or write about a fragrance or smell from your past that anchors you to a specific memory.

  5. Hirshfield discovers a deeper motivation for her face washing ritual than any of the usual suspects. Journal or write a poem about a ritual or practice that you do and drill down to find the deeper underlying motivation for doing it.

  6. Journal or write a poem about “the unwanted” in your life; whatever that means to you and wherever it takes you.

  7. Journal or write a poem about how you deal with the rough edges, the gritty surfaces, and the other irritants of life.

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