Oct. 21, 2024

A few doodles written during AIR (St Andrews Wesley/Vanc) Brandon Wint’s first workshop on prayer and poetry. I haven’t sat in a workshop setting for years, maybe 17 years, the Banff Writers Studio, so this is gonna be interesting!

First prompt: What is prayer?

prayer

I walk with the dead

long for them, call them back

generation after generation

of ancestor faces fixed in black

and white photographs, little miracles.

At night, they slip through cracks

in my grandmother’s rolltop desk

where their images are kept,

their chatter, beautiful laughter

returning, seals my sleep at last.

Second prompt: a response to Bringing the Shovel Down by Ross Gay as read by Brandon Wint. I’ve never read Gay’s poetry before & this was def. a challenging albeit exquisite piece. Given the context of
the workshop I received the poem as a confession. The hard part of confessionals is that while they might help the confessor feel better, without absolution they may pass the trauma forward. This, then, might be an absolution?

Confession Upon Hearing Ross Gay’s ‘Bringing the Shovel Down’

I am going to steal the salt of this poem,
then the white birch,
and probably the starlings in sticker bushes.
100%, for sure, I want blue robin eggs…

Darling, for love I will
copy his light breaking over the fields,
yet, too, for you,

I shall forget every last detail
of his testimony, witness,

his brutal, bruising youth.