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

Master, Serene

Master, Serene are
All hours
We waste, if in
The wasting them,
As in a jar,
We set flowers,

There are no sorrows
Nor joys either
In our life.
So let us learn,
Thoughtlessly wise,
Not to live it,

But to flow down it,
Tranquil, serene,
Letting children
Be our teachers,
And our eyes be
Filled with nature.

On the stream’s edge,
On the road verge,
It falls right –
In always the same
Light respite
From being alive.

Time passes,
Tells us nothing.

We grow old.
Let us learn, as though
Tongue in cheek,
To watch us going.

It’s not worth while
To make a gesture.
There’s no resisting
The cruel god
Who devours forever
His own sons.

Let us pick flowers,
Let’s dip lightly
These hands of ours
In the calm streams,
That we may learn,
Calm like them.

Sunflowers ever
Eyeing the sun,
From life let’s go
Tranquilly, not have
Even the remorse
Of having lived.

Fernando Pessoa
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/fernando-pessoa

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 2/26/25 at 5:00 PM PST

My Thoughts

Finding calm in our world, driven as we are by flash-flood headlines, storms of fear, and wild fires of indignation, is no easy task. I think of the Buddhist Masters and Indian Yogi’s, sitting crosslegged on the cushion, undisturbed by fountain water or wind chimes or the nose of lavender and jasmine.  The effort to idle well takes years of practice under the best of circumstances. But there is little time for idleness in the onslaught of modern mediated life with all its demands on all our devices, especially combined with the unruly urges of our own wild desires and the real-life constraints and consequences of our worldly wiles. Calm is always out there somewhere—in greener pastures, near sunflower fields, walking bare foot, wearing overalls and a straw hat—and somehow, all cared for and, therefore, care-free. Calm is counterintuitive in the zeitgeist of our time. It’s easy to fall prey to nostalgia and long for a time and a place when we could leave our doors unlocked and talk freely to those we meet on the street.

We are not the first generation to face world- shattering events and unprecedented change or to long for calm at a time when it seemed unattainable or inappropriate, given the circumstances. Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa’s poem, Master, Serene, was written in a time of unprecedented change at the onset of WW1 in 1914. The narrator advocates a level of detachment often associated with Eastern Yogic or Buddhist traditions, rising above emotional undercurrents, finding the surface current in life that allows you to flow with it, reclaiming our child-eyes. And, in those idle moments, letting nature fill us, picking flowers from the world around us and placing them in a jar.

Prompt Ideas

1. Journal or write a poem about serenity. It can be a persona poem, or an ode to serenity, or about the experience of serenity.

2. Journal or write a poem using a container metaphor for “wasted hours.” Pessoa talked about putting flowers in the jar turning it into something beautiful or fragrant.

3. Would you want a life with no sorrows nor joys? What might you gain or lose in such a life?

4. Use Pessoa’s phrase, “thoughtlessly wise” as your title and let it take you where it leads.

5. Journal or traite a poem about a time when a child was your teacher.

6. What might it mean to “learn as though tongue in cheek?” What might you learn tongue in cheek?

7. Where in your life do you find the calm streams, the paces you can dip into and from which you can learn calm.

8. Riff on Pessoa ending line, to go tranquilly without even the remorse of having lived. What remorse might come from having lived?

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