April Halprin Wayland has a brave post up today at Teaching Authors. It's called 9-11 Lesson Plan: Stand on Your Head. With many examples and some gentle prodding, she offers a way to write about those topics so big that you can't get your arms around them.
I tried it with my memories of Sept. 11th.
The instructor
dismounted her fake bike
canceled the spin class
herded us out to TVs
bloated with news.
I kept spinning.
If I stopped,
if every plastic wheel
in every stationary race
in every walled-off room
If we stopped,
if I stopped, if they stopped
if stopping suspended
the downward fall
of day.
----Sara Lewis Holmes (all rights reserved)
Poetry Friday is hosted today by Elaine at Wild Rose Reader.
Wow, powerful. I still remember that day, the fact that my aunt and cousins lived so close.
ReplyDeleteI'm surprised by how some years I can let the date pass with few memories and busy myself, and other years, I just have to ...stop.
ReplyDeleteThanks for sharing, Sara. That captures the mood of that day quite well.
ReplyDeleteThanks for this one today.
ReplyDeleteReally wonderful, Sara--wow. Glad our prompt could get you going on this ~
ReplyDeleteAHW
I tried to get life to go on as normal at our house, with "Arthur" on the TV for the kids, and me huddled in another room, watching the mini-TV, trying to fathom what was happening. You nicely captured the cognitive dissonance ....
ReplyDeleteYou perfectly capture the need (sometimes) to keep one's head down and keep moving, in spite of the chaos that surrounds. Perhaps that might be (sometimes) what holds the world together.
ReplyDeleteThis is like a frantic breath of emotion. Each year we stop to remember that terrible day when the world stood still.
ReplyDelete