We possess what we need:
Beauty, realized, like evergreens overhanging
Little-trafficked, curving roads
Along the middle mountains of Pennsylvania,
Or St. Agnes Church Christmas Eve,
Homes left unlocked, safe
During the Nativity Play--Mother’s gold-edged
Heirloom China neatly stacked in a cabinet’s
Clear darkness until gingerly brought out
Next Morning; or Greetings
At a Dutch Pantry Family Restaurant
In summer’s last rain
When cornfields grow shoulder high, and
Soldier toward harvest.
Our rippling creeks and a willow tree
Where children might perch, settle in, hoist up a book,
Are not thwarted, uprooted,
Nor has our central river,
--Enemy bombs can flush a dam to powder--
Itself become a drowned river, sucking up
Carrying away with it
Homesteads, their residents into the indistinct, overflowing
Overly roused banks.
Our Cathedral roofs have not been
Mashed by missile strikes
Which also shred screen doors, interiors, treasure, lore--
As in Ukraine—
Where every Sunrise inspects the condition
Of the nuclear power plant that for more than two years
Could erupt
Any minute now.
© 2024 by Sandra Duguid-Gerstman
In mid-May, Henry and I embarked on our second Poetry Writing Retreat in a Catholic retreat center in Frenchville, Pennsylvania, in order to immerse ourselves in poetry writing for two and one-half days and to brush up on our poetry skills and have fun.
The Retreat was led by Marjorie Maddox [Hafer], an expert and rising poet, who has many, many published poetry books and articles and 40 years of teaching literature and writing at Lock Haven University in PA. We, seven or eight “students,” responded to her creative prompts and wrote steadily for our first evening there and for two more days. (Though we did take off some hours from class afternoons to dedicate to our writing.)
We could also choose to walk an outdoor labyrinth (the expansive grounds, beautiful), visit a grotto in a lovely wooded area on the property, pray, or take part in centering prayer sessions, which a nun offered each day. Henry was invited to lead some basic Qi Gong sessions after lunch each day, to which he agreed. We were blessed there with a very rich and encouraging experience.
The poem above is a response to this prompt she gave us: First, we read a poem by Greg Pape, “The Porpoise.” (Can be found online.) One might think the poem disjointed, but the disparate works together. The speaker is driving a car in Missouri, but describing sober images: the quickly-dropped outside temperature; traffic, a power plant stack’s smoke, dusk, rain, sounds of rain where the speaker seems to have stopped at a lounge, and night.
Then the last five tercets (3-lined stanzas) are an imagined scene of an old woman, sitting with a book, staring out the screen “at some memory”—of “a porpoise appearing/and disappearing in the Gulf.” She ignores her chores and composes “an idea of beauty—”. . . “the skin of the porpoise shines/with the light of two worlds,/ this one and this one.”
The poem makes delightful “sense,” moves from darkness to light, surprise and delight. Marjorie then has us notice the sounds in the poem (alliteration, assonance, consonance); images, verbs, personification, and the “transformation” at the end. (Very important, the transformation—at the end of your poem, you want a “twist” to make the poem work.)
Then she has us write down local images: of the smell, texture, color in the middle of Pennsylvania (pine, for example); of the smell, texture, color, sound of a porpoise (not local, but strange in the handout poem too); of St. Agnes Cathedral Church nearby, of Christmas there; of a memory of our home (she made suggestions—and what does our memory taste like?); of the color and texture of dusk; of dishes; of field corn; of a power plant; of rain, darkness, a screen door, a roof, a Dutch Pantry Family Restaurant. We describe the same items as in the handout poem, but OUR descriptive images are emerging from our own surroundings.
Now—write a poem using all of the poetic elements you have jotted down above: a sensory experience of Pennsylvania, mention St. Agnes Catholic Church, your description of dusk and some kind of dishes, of a power plant (that one was tricky, as was the word “porpoise.”) Rain, darkness, screen door, a roof, the Dutch Pantry Restaurant. I picked the willow tree and rippling creeks from a memory of my home. (I couldn’t work in the porpoise.)