Last week, me and my daughter Teagan spent our snow day together. She studied for mid-terms, napped and played with the dog. I cooked, baked and started watching the series Shameless. When there was about an inch of snow and an inch of ice on the ground, she put on her coat, boots and gloves and set out to build a snowman in our yard. I watched from the kitchen window, as she giggled, trying to build a tiny snowman from snow, slush and ice. When she was done, she conducted a photo shoot of her slushman and named him Tony.
It was an amazing day. One of those days that I know I’ll treasure for the rest of my life. Nothing remarkable happened other than unexpected joy. Which is, of course, everything.
My children have gifted me with so many days like this. But adjacent to this joy, I have been cognizant of how the world has already failed them in so many ways. In 2017, they lost their 11 year old cousin to suicide. Two months later, they lost their aunt, my sister, also to suicide. Externally, their lives went on much like before. Internally, everything was different.
In addition to these traumatic losses there is always the dread and doom of student loans, climate change, wars, etc.
Traumatic loss can make you believe that the next tragedy is always right around the corner. Which brings me to a poem that a subscriber, *Dawn Levitt, wrote in response to my Snow Day writing prompt.
Cold Blows by Dawn Levitt.
I watched the neighbor come out of his house,
gripping a hammer like a murder weapon,
his face a crease of anger and vengeance.
Earlier, I heard him scraping ice from the windshield,
looked out the window just in time to see
the handle of his scraper snap in half.
The ice was gnarled and bullet proof,
rain followed by snow and wind
rippled the glass with a corrugated plate of
stainless water, frozen into an impenetrable barrier.
I thought he’d lost his mind,
prepared to watch him smash the glass in a rage,
but he used the claw end of the hammer
to pry up the edge of the ice sheet like
a piece of plywood.
*Dawn is a two-time heart transplant recipient who co-founded an animal rescue which saves dogs from the streets of Detroit. Her poems and essays have most recently appeared in or are forthcoming in Blue Villa Magazine, Open Secrets, Wishbone Words and the Remington Review. You can find her online at www.dawnlevittauthor.com.
I admire the way that Dawn explores the assumption/belief that violence is inevitable through a moment in which the speaker’s assumption is interrupted by a gentler reality. It made me also want to write poems that do this.
The two poems below also tackle simultaneous dread and joy—something that children tend to accept with open minds more often than adults. The first, Just another Tuesday in the Anthropocene by Jared Beloff from his full-length poetry collection WHO WILL CRADLE YOUR HEAD, explores the dread of climate change and the
About his poem, Jared Beloff writes:
“Most of the poems in my collection on climate change are highly speculative, a projection into the future from where we are right now. When depicting the present, as I do in this poem, I try to call attention to the way our norms are often absurd in the face of loss. Every summer we visit Jersey shore towns like Brigantine, Avalon and Stone Harbor so when I started to think about climate change and the everyday ways we ignore what is shifting in front of us, the fine, pumped sand used to keep the beaches in Stone Harbor from eroding came to mind. In this case, for both the speaker and the town, preventing change is about maintaining some sort of imagined normal, a childlike ignorance toward what approaches with the tide.”
“While most of the poems I write undergo multiple revisions, “Survival Mode” arrived pretty much intact. In fact, I found myself more or less writing it in real time, in my head and on a napkin, during one of the stranger family dinner conversations I’ve ever been a part of. Afterwards, I remember racing upstairs to type it out. It was one of those rare occasions where a poem appeared before it really registered that I was writing one at all.”
Prompt: write a poem that explores both dread & joy through a specific scene. Try not to overthink or overexplain. Let the details speak. Or write a poem about a time when you believed you were in danger (maybe a trauma response) but you were wrong.
You might alternately borrow a line from one of the poems above, & write a poem around that line.
Some possibilities:
-I thought he’d lost his mind…
-I try not to think too hard about…
-Truth be told, we need…
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Don’t forget, if you write a poem from one of these prompts—consider sending it to me at joanpglass@gmail.com with the subject line SUBSTACK FEATURE. If I am interested in sharing it, I will reach out!
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Elder Lore at Maine Writers Alliance (one four-hour session)
Thank you for sharing my response to your writing prompt!