Mindful Poetry Gathering- November 15, 2023

A new beginning.

Thank you to all who attended our second Mindful Poetry Gathering of the season! We listened and contemplated the poem "You Begin" by Margaret Atwood. Stacy Sims opened our session with a meditation focusing on Yes and Now. 

Elena Estella Green facilitated our exploration of Atwood with the writing prompt: 

Craft a poem using the five words you wrote down earlier.
A suggestion is to use them to express your senses:
sight, sound, smell, taste, and touch.
Start your poem with You begin… or This is… OR Where do I begin...

As always follow your Muse.

Watch the Gathering on YouTube

Join our next Gathering January 17, 2024

Read poems created by the group below. And send us your poem to include!

Poems inspired by "You Begin" by Margaret Atwood.

Have a poem you'd like us to post here? Reach out to bryce@thewell.world.

Sliver of Beginning
By Holly Brians Ragusa

Life Begins at this moment and the last
and the ones we count and discount.

Life begins in the endings
and beginnings
and the interiority of ourselves
pressed down or expressed.

Life began in a window sill where
this child attached a heartstring to the moon
from earliest memory
and lashes herself there still
with wrinkled edges
and aches unknown by a younger self.

With new and differing views
this moongazer has phases of awareness;

Seasons of pain
stabbed with compassion, involuntarily pulled under its weight,
felt in the anguish of all human hearts.

Seasons of love
grown beneath trees, within pages of someone else’s story,
in the smiles felt across rooms in private spaces. 

Life begins in beginnings
and endings
though life and death
expand in awareness.

Before we are born, framed, timed or encapsulated,
we are otherworldly beings hanging in someones sky
a sliver of our next beginning.

⭕️
by Elena Estella Green

I begin with a dream
The moon, a meteor shower
Pre dawn in November
Searching the sky for a sign
I look but cannot find
Nothing but stars
Each one a poem
Shifting from one
Hand to another.
Each one breathing light
Into the atmosphere.
This landscape
This horizon
Just beyond my life
Sometimes strong
Sometimes fluid
It becomes water
A torrent of feeling
Worn by the years
Now passing so fast
Like folded space.
Seconds of surprise
Surging forward always
In silence before a word
Is spoken, it is imprinted
On my tongue
I begin at the beginning
The unbroken circle.

Smudgebite
by Jennifer Shikes Haines

You begin within an opal moon
This moon windows our world

Unexpected

We are all unexpected

Smudge us together into sensory fragments

Your eye sees a hill-meadow of hazelnut,
a gulfstream of tulips

Your tongue tastes pine resin,
the grapefruit and coffee of tomorrow

Your ear hears llorona calls,
or those of titwillows

Your nose smells the gingerbread,
kugel or ma'amoul your grandmother bakes

Your fingers touch the splintered boards,
or goose down of my love village.

Untitled
by Zohreh S-Afshar Zand

I begin the way
a way not known to me
Don't know where it will take me
I begin on paper using my hand
letting my heart guide it
string the words
I begin by letting the words become raindrops
while letting the road guide me
Or is it that I guide the road?
A road on which I feel the rain
the smell of soaked earth
of tears and pain
A sensation telling me I'm real
There I go on a road smooth like the skin
and sometimes rough as a stormy ocean
There I go anchored in the believe
I can walk this road in small beauties