Healing Poetry

Writing and Healing Idea #23: What If the Moon’s a Balloon?

Posted by Diane Morrow on February 13, 2007 in Healing Poetry, Writing Ideas

There’s a poem by e.e.cummings—“who knows if the moon’s a balloon” It begins like this: who knows if the moon’s a balloon, coming out of a keen city in the sky– The poem can serve as a kind of springboard for making a list of questions that begin by asking: WHAT IF? For instance—— What if the moon’s a balloon? What if the balloon pops? What if the moon is a hot-air balloon and the Wizard of Oz gets into the balloon and floats away, and all of this before you can get into the balloon with him, and you have to find your way back home on your own? What if. . . what? Consider making your own list of questions. Write as fast as you can without thinking. Begin with a single question—with e.e. cumming’s question if you like—and then just keep going. Don’t worry about the questions making sense—or the questions being clever—or even interesting. Just write them. Try to write fast without thinking too much. When you have come to the end of something—a pause—look back over the questions you’ve written. Circle the ones that you like–or that surprise you in some way. Save the questions—especially the circled ones. Who knows? One of them could become the beginning to a poem—or to some other whole new...

Sweetness

Posted by Diane Morrow on February 8, 2007 in Healing Language and Healing Images, Healing Poetry

One of three places that I’ve come across Mary Oliver’s poem, The Wild Geese, in the last month or so was as a kind of epigraph—before the table of contents—to the poetry anthology, Staying Alive, edited by Neil Astley. The anthology, first published in Britain, is one I would recommend, and I’ll probably get around to writing about it more here on this site one of these days. Meanwhile, today, I wanted to draw your attention to one particular poem that I found in the anthology—a poem called “Sweetness,” by Stephen Dunn. The poem is freely available on the web, this because of a project–Poetry Out Loud–which encourages high school students to memorize and recite poetry. But back to the poem, Sweetness—the first seven lines— Just when it has seemed I couldn’t bear one more friend waking with a tumor, one more maniac with a perfect reason, often a sweetness has come and changed nothing in the world except the way I stumbled through it. . . Nice, huh? The poem makes me think, among other things, of that bag of tomatoes and that rotisserie chicken in Eighteen Ways of Looking at Cancer. But any way you look at it, I think maybe he’s onto...

Eighteen Ways of Looking at Cancer

Posted by Diane Morrow on February 4, 2007 in Featured Pieces, Healing Poetry

EIGHTEEN WAYS OF LOOKING AT CANCER by Eleanor, Louise, Lydia, Nell, Rosetta and Sandra I I love my mother, my brother and my grandmother But I’m not ready to go and be with them yet What about my three children? II Questions: How are we going to proceed? What is my chance of recurrence? How did this happen to me? Why am I even in this picture? III A lot of people think, “Why me?” I never did go through, “Why me?” IV Pure and simple fear Fear of what? Pure and simple fear of pain Fear of the next thing, and the next V Depression. Sometimes you don’t recognize when you’re depressed. There are some days when you just don’t want to talk on the phone. VI I felt like a marionette My strings being pulled in every direction They want me to have this scan, and this test, And this bloodwork. Where do you want me now? VII I left my body and the treatment And the doctors– I left them to the guidance of God VIII The whirlwind, the disruption The chaos it created in everyone else’s life— My husband’s, my three sons, their families, my friends, and mine. Like a tornado had come through It kept getting bigger IX When is this going to end? Where is the end? X Lost in this never-ending struggle or tunnel The struggle is the tunnel On and on Never-ending Dark XI I want to say something about sickness Not being able to keep anything down Sickness on top of sickness Complications of a weakened immune system XII So much information Overwhelmed with information Three bulging grocery bags (And you’re sick. When can you read?) XIII Sleep What’s a good night’s sleep? Waking up exhausted The lack of energy is indescribable XIV Burning, Burning And more burning During radiation XV So tired doing basic things Will I ever be normal again? XVI With all of that you have to deal with generalizations And stereotypes: “Oh, you still have your hair?” XVII Other people’s insensitivities: “We’re not talking about cancer.” XVIII Other people’s kindnesses: A bag of tomatoes A rotisserie chicken. This piece was written at Cancer Services in Winston-Salem, North Carolina at a writing and healing workshop in 2004 after we had read together “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird,” by Wallace...

Wild Geese: An Image for Writing and Healing

Posted by Diane Morrow on January 14, 2007 in A Different Perspective, Healing Images, Healing Poetry

Three times in the last month I have come across, in three different places, the poem, “Wild Geese,” by Mary Oliver. After the third time, I thought this might be a poem I ought to pay some attention to. The poem opens with the speaker telling us, her reader, that we do not have to be good, we do not have to walk on our knees for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting. And, then, this line: “You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves.” It’s a radical line. Maybe a radical poem. It goes against the grain of business as usual. The way the mind and the will are so often, for so many of us, yanking the body around to places it doesn’t really want to go—places even, sometimes, that can make the body a tad sick—or sicker. And sometimes maybe this is one of those silver linings of getting sick—or so people will sometimes tell me—the small good part—how a person can begin to learn to quit yanking the body around. The stakes are too high anymore to do all that yanking. Sometimes illness is the beginning, for some people, or so they tell me, of beginning to pay closer attention to what the body loves and needs—and what it doesn’t. I’ve been carrying the poem with me this month, looking at it now and then, and now, today, there’s one particular word that seems to jump off the page: meanwhile. MEANWHILE as the good part? Because after the speaker of the poem tells us we do not have to be good, we do not have to walk on our knees for a hundred miles, repenting, we only have to let the soft animal of our body love what it loves, after that she invites us, the reader, to tell her of our despair and she will tell us hers— And then there’s this shift—this leap—and she writes: Meanwhile the world goes on. Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain are moving across the landscapes. . . Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air, are heading home again. . . It’s as if the camera had been close in—a history of despair—or a history with some despair in it–but then—a shift—the camera pulls back—a shift to a larger landscape—a leap—meanwhile—somewhere—those wild geese, high in the clean blue air, are heading...

Whatever Leads to Joy

Posted by Diane Morrow on December 22, 2006 in Healing Language and Healing Images, Healing Poetry, Recommended Books

The book, What the Living Do, was written by Marie Howe in the wake of her brother’s death from AIDS. It’s a book that, perhaps better than any other book I know, walks that delicate balance between making memorial—remembering who and what has been lost—and choosing life in the wake of such loss—figuring out, day by day, what it is that the living do (after). There’s joy in the book—and in the poem—but it’s that bittersweet kind of joy— The poem, “My Dead Friends,” can be found here. The poem consists of only thirteen lines. Here are six of them: I have begun, when I’m weary and can’t decide an answer to a bewildering question to ask my dead friends for their opinion and the answer is often immediate and clear. . . They stand in unison shaking their heads and smiling—whatever leads to joy, they always answer. ....

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