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

What To Remember Upon Waking

In that first hardly noticed moment in which you wake,
coming back to this life from the other
more secret, moveable and frighteningly honest world
where everything began,
there is a small opening into the new day
which closes the moment you begin your plans.

What you can plan is too small for you to live.
What you can live wholeheartedly will make plans enough
for the vitality hidden in your sleep.

To be human is to become visible
while carrying what is hidden as a gift to others.
To remember the other world in this world
is to live in your true inheritance.

You are not a troubled guest on this earth,
you are not an accident amidst other accidents
you were invited from another and greater night
than the one from which you have just emerged.

|Now, looking through the slanting light of the morning window
toward the mountain presence of everything that can be
what urgency calls you to your one love?
What shape waits in the seed of you
to grow and spread its branches
against a future sky?

Is it waiting in the fertile sea?
In the trees beyond the house?
In the life you can imagine for yourself?
In the open and lovely white page on the writing desk?

—David Whyte

The Read Around

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:

The next Read-Around is 10/22/26 at
5:00 PM PDT — 8:00 PM EDT

My Thoughts

Reading David Whyte's poem, What To Remember When Waking, I immediately thought of the Moody Blues album, Days of Future Passed, released in 1967. I was taken by that enigmatic title, stunned by the album concept that followed a day from dawn to dusk and into the night, and touched by the lyric poetry of the songs. Drummer Graeme Edge’s opening poem, Morning Glory, recited by keyboardist Mike Pinder, mesmerized me. I am sure my poetic roots went back earlier, but it was the first poem I consciously memorized. I did not know it then as my calling because it seemed a leap too far for me to even imagine myself as a poet. But there it was, a doorway to another life, shimmering with a brightness from which I could not help but turn away. I now know the calling is not to an identity as a poet, which is too static and confining to serve as anything more than a doorway. The calling is on the other side to a life lived in and from the depths; or, as Divid Whyte puts it, from a more secret, moveable and frighteningly honest world where everything began.

Prompt Ideas

1. Journal or write a poem about dwelling in possibilties.

2. Journal of write a poem about your true place of dwelling? You might consider what typically occupies your mind and heart or what activity you do that you love or that free you from the constraints of life.

3. Describe the house of your true dwelling, which may have many rooms (for humor, worry, doubt, love, etc.)

4. Describe the house of poetry (or writing or journaling) as you imagine it. What is it made of (the materials, the structure, the layout, etc)? How is it furnished?

5. Whatever you imagine your dwelling to be, what visitors do you welcome? To whom or what do you spread wide your harrow hands?

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