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

A Vision

If we will have the wisdom to survive,
to stand like slow growing trees
on a ruined place, renewing, enriching it...
then a long time after we are dead
the lives our lives prepare will live
here, their houses strongly placed
upon the valley sides...
The river will run
clear, as we will never know it...
On the steeps where greed and ignorance cut down
the old forest, an old forest will stand,
its rich leaf-fall drifting on its roots.
The veins of forgotten springs will have opened.
Families will be singing in the fields...
Memory
native to this valley, will spread over it
like a grove, and memory will grow
into legend, legend into song, song
into sacrament. The abundance of this place,
the songs of its people and its birds,
will be health and wisdom and indwelling
light. This is no paradisal dream.
Its hardship is its reality.

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

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:

Writing From The Inside Out

The next Read-Around is /25 at 5:00 PM PDT

My Thoughts

For many of us, the current state of the union is appalling. The atmospheric river of inflow from the world sweeps us out of our lives and into a relentless melee of trouble and turmoil.  Social media, and much of what is called “news,” has been reduced to WWF-style trash talk aimed to inflame and turn us against each other. Tethered to our devices like umbilical cords, we can, at any given moment, be bombarded by “alerts” and “notifications” and insistent voices sucking our energy and wresting our attention from ourselves. 

We need poets, like Wendell Berry, and poems like Vision to remind us that we have the wisdom to survive; that we can stand in the face of it all and be like slow growing trees anchored, not in the news of the day, but in the soil of the earth, with its proven power of renewal. Berry claims the Vision he paints is “not a paradisal dream” but the result of treating the earth and each other as sacrosanct, starting in ours live, and the lives our lives prepare. The vision may not come in our lifetimes, but it will come if we, and those we inspire, through hardship and resilience, keep true to our roots in the earth and faith in our calling as caretakers of the world and each other.

Prompt Ideas

  1. Write your own vision of a future generations from now.

  2. Journal or write a poem from the image of a slow growing tree in a ruined place.

  3. Journal or write a poem about what you do or can do to renew and enrich the planet, your local area, are your own environment in a way that is sustainable.

  4. Journal or write a poem about how your life, the way you have lived, and the things you have done, prepares for the lives of those that fallow. For instance, if you’re life and the way you lived, all the good and bad and mess of it, were taken as an example, how would people who followed that example live?

  5. Journal or write a poem titled: Paradise. Consider writing about some natural landscape or factor in the world that has been lost and you would love to see restored.

  6. Write a dialogue with the part of you that serves as your jailor. What does that part have to say about your misdeeds and your imprisonment? How does that part feel and think about its job as jailor. How might you help to relinquish the job as jailor.

  7. If all of your anger and hurt were somehow burned away or relaased, what would you like left that you could love?

  8. As usual, write about whatever else inspires you form the poem or from life.