An Ode

Well, I must confess that I have not had much time for writing this week, so I thought I would share the last of my poetic prose from my day in the Susan Wooldridge workshop.

In one of her class exercises, she carefully guided us through the use of random words in our work. When we arrived in class, Susan had scattered across the table miscellaneous words taken from a variety of resources. Each one was taped to the back of a ticket stub. We were asked to pick out ten "word tickets" from the heaping mound and use them in our poetry.

At the end of the day, Susan allowed us to take a couple of our favorite stubs home. I decided on only one ticket for myself.

These two words had a real impact on me!


Over the last several days, I was having a conversation with a good friend via email. She had just completed a drawing that took over twenty hours to do. I truly enjoyed her piece, and thought she had successfully captured the essence of her subject.

She was not so sure of her accomplishment. And my response back to her was, "Look how far you have come. Look how much you have learned from the experience, no matter how long it took to finish."

Then I admitted to her that I, too, was guilty of not stopping to take notice of my own life. I constantly feel as if I am moving at a snails pace, when I am really getting more done than I allow myself to take credit for or maybe even realize.

This particular verse is an Ode to these feelings and a reminder to... stop and revel in the moment.


I come from a lush green meadow called "only if"

My name is "tomorrow"

Yesterday, my name was "today"

Secretly, my name is "persist nonetheless",

constantly pestered by one life's absolute value.