always a next time

Greetings, All!  My summer hiatus has come to a close and I'm happy to return to your company this week and particularly next week, when I'll have the honor of hosting Poetry Friday again. 

Not too much has changed since May, although an awful lot is different this year, both personally and professionally. I've dropped in over the summer because the Inklings monthly challenge has continued apace, and it's easy for me to rise to that kind of prompt. (Turns out it's much harder to rise to my own intentions, which have none of the force of someone else's expectation! A treatise on this subject sometime soon...)

And once again this week we've been offered a Good One--this time simply and straightforwardly by Mary Lee:

       Use Next Time, by Joyce Sutphen, as a mentor poem for your own Next Time poem.

I do love the way this poem is disorganized, not in a visual or syntactic way but in a conceptual way, so that the first time you read it, it seems quite sensible, but as you re-read, you realize the whole poem is built on an idea that not everyone accepts--that we get a next time, a do-over, another chance to be our-selves. And not only that, the poem goes here and there from the kitchen to a London coffee shop to Istanbul, from awake to dreaming, from knowledge of factoids to lasting connection, and it all happens subtly. I also found myself morphing from a trope about the hair & body I've always envied to, well, some-thing bigger.

I enjoyed doing the thing where I put the mentor poem in one column on the left and write my poem in the column on the right. Do you ever do it that way? 

Join me next week when the new school year will be in full swing for lots of you all, while I'm trying all over again to be a member of the Working Retired (which is nothing at all like the Walking Dead, nuh-uh).

Until then, let's thank Buffy Silverman for hosting us today, and let's be sure to visit the other Inklings to see what they'll be like Next Time.

Mary Lee Hahn @ A(nother) Year of Reading

Catherine Flynn @ Reading to the Core

Molly Hogan @ Nix the Comfort Zone

Linda Mitchell @ A Word Edgewise
Margaret Simon @ Reflections on the Teche