It's so fun to see which elements everyone chose from Terrie's collage sheets, and whether they combined images from the two sheets or not.
One from Colleen:
Two from Joanne:
One from Marsie:
Three from Peggy:
One from Tammy B.
The "mail by" date for this swap is Monday May 20th.
(if you need an extra day and get them in the mail Tuesday that's okay!)
3 comments:
Marvelous and humorous....xox
Marvelous work by all. Mine is heading to you tomorrow.
Colleen’s postcard brought to mind a poem from Jim Moore, a Minnesota poet and professor. It’s in his book, "The Freedom of History," an older, yet evocative, publication from Milkweed Press. (Diagonal bars indicate the original line breaks in case the formatting is lost in the posting process):
Today’s Meditation: “It’s Not Supposed To Last Forever” Cavafy
Every day, and for no apparent reason,/
I remember prison. My footlocker,/
barbed wire out the window, how coffee tasted -- /
instant, lukewarm from the bathroom tap/
first thing in the morning. I would stand there/
sipping, watching the Standard sign through barred windows,/
miles down the road. I can still see how red/
that sign was in the pale sky at dawn,/
how beautiful it seemed to me, so far away/
beyond the fence, and yet near somehow./
I stood next to the shaving mirror,/
as close to the sky as I could get./
Even then, I knew how lucky I was/
“and I really lived in undivided love,” as Cavafy says./
I understood how the loneliness and the love/
would always be mixed up inside me,/
like a sky and its Standard sign bound/
together in the little nearness of time. *
Except for the prison imagery, Moore’s poem would be almost Sominex peaceful, describing someone, early on a weekday, contemplating a crepuscular moment, coffee cup in hand, before heading off to work. And this peaceful feeling made me wonder what sort of crime an introspective person seemingly acquainted with Cavafy’s poetry would have done (the speaker doesn’t seem angry, profane, retributive, or a danger to himself or society, so why the need to put him away? (That may well be Moore's point)).
I also wondered why that “looking out the window” memory comes back to the speaker each day, now that it seems he has been released. Had I been in prison, I would think that PTSD horrors would persist (inmates, prison guards, threats, lock downs), so what is it about the speaker's recurrent window view, at the moment when night turns into waiting day, that made that such a lodestone?
Which makes me want to consider the significance of the memories that persist with me. Why do I remember them so often, and what does that tell about me as a person?
Turns out that Jim Moore’s biographical information (http://www.gf.org/fellows/17271-jim-moore) demystifies the prison reference, but I love that Colleen’s postcard, simple in design, was, to me, an ekphrastic portrayal of this poem.
In her postcard, I see the blue sky as the inmate might have seen it, albeit later in the day, with the vertical bars and his feeling both distant from the sky, yet somehow still a part of it.
And Colleen’s use of the word “play" suggests that imagination can make even oppressive situations bearable, and that the sky does not have to feel any further away from us if we are confined in a solitary cell than if we have can come and go as we please.
In fact, the sky remains the same hopeful distance away from all of us, even if our freedoms are justly (or unjustly) reduced.
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