Arts! By the People
Empowering Individuals Through Collaborative Acts of Self-Expression
I brought in flowers for poetic inspiration today at the seniors’ poetry workshop. We have often written about the past in our poems; this morning was a moment to write from the present. What do we see in the flowers before us? Light catching inside the daisies, a long-forgotten, blush-pink rose.
We closed our eyes for a minute, and then opened them before the flowers—to look, again. N began writing before I even prompted the class to begin. She wrote for 15 minutes or more, and then asked me to read. Like many beginning students, she wanted to know if what she was expressing was “right.” It is hard sometimes to let go of the idea that everything we write (or even feel, believe, and think) has to be “correct.” Poetry asks us to commit to what we feel and experience, or at the very least, to question.
Later, we listened to each others’ poems and then marveled at all the different moments we captured from the same bouquets. And A, duly inspired, recited part of a Shakespeare poem:
When daisies pied and violets blue
And lady-smocks all silver-white
And cuckoo-buds of yellow hue
Do paint the meadows with delight,
The cuckoo then, on every tree,
Mocks married men; for thus sings he,
Cuckoo …
