NaPoWriMo Day 29: "Again and Again"

Today's NaPoWriMo prompt: "Today, I’d like to challenge you to [produce] a poem that meditates, from a position of tranquility, on an emotion you have felt powerfully. You might try including a dramatic, declarative statement, like Hass’s 'All the new thinking is about loss,' or O’Hara’s 'It is easy to be beautiful; it is difficult to appear so.' Or, like Baudelaire, you might try addressing your feeling directly, as if it were a person you could talk to. There are as many approaches to this as there are poets, and poems."

Today's PAD Challenge prompt: "For today’s prompt, take the phrase '(blank) Again,' replace the blank with a word or phrase, make the new phrase the title of your poem, and then write your poem. Possible titles include: 'Here We Go Again,' 'On the Road Again,' 'Stumped on What to Write Again,' and 'Doing the Wrong Thing Again.'"

I was afraid I wasn't going to make it today as I'm swamped with urgent grading and distracted by worry about a friend, but I found a few minutes in the late afternoon, and I'm determined not to slip up so close to the end. My poem turned out to be more about meditation practice, something very important to me over the past year, than to be a meditation in itself. And while I don't always feel tranquil about longing as an emotion, at the moment it's not the thing I'm feeling, so I did consider it  calmly and from a distance here. I used the Emily Dickinson lines as my declarative statement; I have often spoken in classes about her use of such statements to lead off poems.

Again and Again

Longing is like the seed

That wrestles in the ground

wrote Emily Dickinson.

And because I have always

known its sharp twist and pull

flipping and pinning me,

how it digs the raw tunnels

of its roots, long and tangled

as unplowed prairie,

so I return again and again

to sit and follow breath in

and out of the bright air above,

to feel the dank earth of me

shudder and heave with it

again and again as well.

To go down there in the dark

of it, where its cells divide,

where it moves the way it does,

pushing upward through clods

towards the faintest glow.

To lay myself gently next to it,

telling it of the rain that seeps

invisibly downwards, murmuring

yes, there, there you are.

--Draft by Anne Myles. Please do not quote, cite, or copy without permission.