AUGUST POET'S PEN SUMMARY & NEXT MEETING
Poet's Pen is a dedicated time to share our own and other poets' works, to allow time for writing/workshopping, and for closing with reading of works in progress. SIX poets met on August 31 to listen, write, and read a variety of poems - and have a ton of fun! Please join us on Monday, September 28th at 4:30pm for our next gathering. Check lopezlibrary.org or email Beth for more information.
Poems Shared
The Honey in the Bones: Poems to Rewild the Soul
by Caroline Mellor

The book is a spell. A rewilding of the soul. A realignment with the sacred cycles of nature and our bodies, and an invocation to restore kinship, reciprocity and harmony in barbarous, disconnected times. From one winter solstice to the next, we dance from darkness to light and back again, encompassing sweetness and bitterness, times of rest and celebration, grief and healing, and cohering in the beauty, magic and wisdom of embracing the whole. The Honey in the Bones reminds us that the sweetness and nourishment we seek in life are always available within. This is poetry as witchcraft, activism, healing, prayer and play. It is gentle, potent medicine for anyone who holds a vision for a kinder world. Above all, it is a love letter to an Earth on the cusp, and a mother's dream of hope for the future. CAROLINE MELLOR lives in East Sussex with her husband and two children. The Honey in the Bones is her debut collection of poetry and prose. www.carolinemellorwriter.com

"STILL"

 
By the Fire We Carry: The Generations-Long Fight for Justice on Native Land
by Rebecca Nagle

An impeccably researched (Washington Post) work of reportage and American history that braids the story of the forced removal of Native Americans onto treaty lands in the nation's earliest days, and a small-town murder in the 1990s that led to a Supreme Court ruling reaffirming Native rights to that land more than a century later.Before 2020, American Indian reservations made up roughly 55 million acres of land in the United States. Nearly 200 million acres are reserved for National Forests--in the emergence of this great nation, our government set aside more land for trees than for Indigenous peoples.In the 1830s Muscogee people were rounded up by the US military at gunpoint and forced into exile halfway across the continent. At the time, they were promised this new land would be theirs for as long as the grass grew and the waters ran. But that promise was not kept. When Oklahoma was created on top of Muscogee land, the new state claimed their reservation no longer existed. Over a century later, a Muscogee citizen was sentenced to death for murdering another Muscogee citizen on tribal land. His defense attorneys argued the murder occurred on the reservation of his tribe, and therefore Oklahoma didn't have the jurisdiction to execute him. Oklahoma asserted that the reservation no longer existed. In the summer of 2020, the Supreme Court settled the dispute. Its ruling that would ultimately underpin multiple reservations covering almost half the land in Oklahoma, including Nagle's own Cherokee Nation. Here Rebecca Nagle recounts the generations-long fight for tribal land and sovereignty in eastern Oklahoma. By chronicling both the contemporary legal battle and historic acts of Indigenous resistance, By the Fire We Carry stands as a landmark work of American history. The story it tells exposes both the wrongs that our nation has committed and the Native-led battle for justice that has shaped our country.
Pam shared her narrative poem about a residency in Alaska.
 
Jordana shared her poem snippets.
Writing Time
Prompt: Write a two-line poem
 
This prompt was an idea from Ezra Pound's poem:
 
"In a Station of the Metro"
The apparition of these faces in the crowd; 
Petals on a wet, black bough.
 
Some of us attempted a similar form (quite difficult, in my opinion!), others wrote from their own thoughts.