Greetings, writers—
Next week, my kids will go back to school, I’ll return to my office space, and the beautiful bright chaos of summer will be over. I’ve got mixed feelings about this. I’m looking forward to the familiar routine: the bus ride downtown, the long days of work, eating lunch with the lovely people at the Writers’ Block, the free seltzer in the refrigerator. Far less exciting is the coming rain, the daily beef I’ll have with my children for not washing their lunch dishes, and the fact that I will be cold almost every minute of my life from late October until May.
So let’s have one last summer poem, this one by Jane Kenyon, because it’s not over yet, even though I said it was in a post earlier this month.
Incidentally, I used a line from Kenyon’s poem “Things” as the epigraph to Hello Goodbye, which about is a girl who spends a week with her parents and their friends at a fadingly fancy New England hotel so the friends can say goodbye to her mother, who is dying of cancer. It is, as so many first novels are, semi-autobiographical, though I also made pretty much everything up.
Jane Kenyon was just starting to write her best poetry when she fell ill with what at first seemed like the flu, but which turned out to be leukemia. She died at 47, a little more than a year after being diagnosed.
Jane lived in New Hampshire, as we once did. Wilmot, N.H. was half an hour from the village we lived in (it really was called a village), and practically next door to the mountain we used to hike around and the lake we used to swim in. Maybe one day, without knowing it, small me and grown her sat on lichen-covered rocks and watched the Mt. Kearsarge hang-gliders together.
If you’re reading on a phone, it’s possible the line breaks might be messed up. If so, please read the poem here.
Three Songs at the End of Summer
1947 –1995
A second crop of hay lies cut and turned. Five gleaming crows search and peck between the rows. They make a low, companionable squawk, and like midwives and undertakers possess a weird authority. Crickets leap from the stubble, parting before me like the Red Sea. The garden sprawls and spoils. Across the lake the campers have learned to water-ski. They have, or they haven’t. Sounds of the instructor’s megaphone suffuse the hazy air. “Relax! Relax!” Cloud shadows rush over drying hay, fences, dusty lane, and railroad ravine. The first yellowing fronds of goldenrod brighten the margins of the woods. Schoolbooks, carpools, pleated skirts; water, silver-still, and a vee of geese. * The cicada’s dry monotony breaks over me. The days are bright and free, bright and free. Then why did I cry today for an hour, with my whole body, the way babies cry? * A white, indifferent morning sky, and a crow, hectoring from its nest high in the hemlock, a nest as big as a laundry basket.... In my childhood I stood under a dripping oak, while autumnal fog eddied around my feet, waiting for the school bus with a dread that took my breath away. The damp dirt road gave off this same complex organic scent. I had the new books—words, numbers, and operations with numbers I did not comprehend—and crayons, unspoiled by use, in a blue canvas satchel with red leather straps. Spruce, inadequate, and alien I stood at the side of the road. It was the only life I had.
Take whatever piece of this poem speaks to you and use it as a springboard for your own scene/poem/stream-of-consciousness gush. A few suggestions below.
In case it’s not obvious, I think there’s great value in stream-of-consciousness gushing. It’s low stakes; it can be done quickly and anywhere; it takes all kinds.
Less threatening, less time-consuming, and, frankly, freeing: what’s not to love?
Sub in three of your own adjectives in the final stanza, and write forward from that new sentence.
Begin something with the sentence “The days are bright and free.”
Describe a summer walk.
Answer the question, “Why did I cry today?”
What dread took your (or your character’s) breath away?
Happy writing—
Emily
P.S. Here’s Kenyon’s husband, the poet Donald Hall, on loving Jane and on the importance of the “third thing.” “We lived in the house of poetry, which was also the house of love and grief…”
Ended up loving the "why I cried" prompt. I used it with each of my three protagonists and was surprised that the most interesting bits came from the character least in touch with her feelings. Since she couldn't explain why she was crying, I was forced to show and not tell, forced to hide the real story and trust the reader to figure out what this character was feeling and why.