And Line 4!

Donna's added it. 

Line 3 of the Progressive Poem

Robyn has added the third line!

 

April 1 Linda Mitchell at A Word Edgewise
April 2 Tricia at The Miss Rumphius Effect
April 3 Robyn at Life on the Deckle Edge
April 4 Donna Smith at Mainely Write
April 5 Denise at https://mrsdkrebs.edublogs.org/
April 6 Buffy at http://www.buffysilverman.com/blog
April 7 Jone at https://www.jonerushmacculloch.com/
April 8 Janice Scully at Salt City Verse
April 9 Tabatha at https://tabathayeatts.blogspot.com/
April 10 Marcie at Marcie Flinchum Atkins
April 11 Rose at Imagine the Possibilities | Rose’s Blog
April 12 Fran Haley at Lit Bits and Pieces
April 13 Cathy Stenquist
April 14 Janet Fagel at Mainly Write
April 15 Carol Varsalona at Beyond LiteracyLink
April 16 Amy Ludwig VanDerwater at The Poem Farm
April 17 Kim Johnson at Common Threads
April 18 Margaret at Reflections on the Teche
April 19 Ramona at Pleasures from the Page
April 20 Mary Lee at A(nother) Year of Reading
April 21 Tanita at TanitasDavis.com
April 22 Patricia Franz
April 23 Ruth at There’s No Such Thing as a Godforsaken Town
April 24 Linda Kulp Trout at http://lindakulptrout.blogspot.com
April 25 Heidi Mordhorst at My Juicy Little Universe
April 26 Michelle Kogan at: https://moreart4all.wordpress.com/
April 27 Linda Baie at Teacher Dance
April 28 Pamela Ross at Words in Flight
April 29 Diane Davis at Starting Again in Poetry
April 30 April Halprin Wayland at Teaching Authors

NPM Day 3: SJT April: Lament

Welcome, SJT friends! I'm glad to be hosting today and I'm looking forward to reading what you share. Leave your post in the comments and I will round them up. I have comment moderation enabled, so you won't see your comment right away. I'll get to it as fast as I can.

 

The topic I chose today, given that we're in the second half of Lent, is Lament. The world has plenty to lament right now, and I suggested writing a Psalm of Lament. I wrote about this topic some here during the pandemic, and I quoted Aaron Niequist saying that a third of the Psalms in the Bible are about lament, whereas zero percent of modern worship songs are. 

Here's my Psalm of Lament. I'm thinking of many people and places dear to me, but Haiti is always, always on my mind.

Lament

Lord,
our knees are sore
from praying,
our eyes are sore
from weeping.

How long, O Lord,
will
we wait

for health
for comfort
for change
for home
for justice?

How long
will
we see
the wicked prosper?

Have you seen
our trouble?
Do you care?
Have you forgotten us?

Rescue us!
We’re begging you!
Pull us from the flames,
from under the building collapsed in the earthquake,
from the waves where we’re drowning.
Save us!

Take away
the violence
the hatred
the displacement
the grief:
Give us a world full of your love,
a table where we can sit in peace and eat our meal,
a bed where we can sleep quietly at night.

Open the gate to the garden again
and let us in!

 

©Ruth Bowen Hersey

 

Patricia's post is here, and she's written a heartfelt Psalm of Lament.

 

Karen just saw the migration of the Sandhill Cranes, and she's written a beautiful post full of gratitude. Oh, Karen, I hope to see that someday, and in the meantime, thank you so much for sharing it! You're right; sometimes lament can wait! 

Linda wrote a lovely post on lament and different ways it presents itself in the world. 

Bob has struggles that he's put into his own Psalm of Lament. Praying for Kathy! 

Margaret is home with Covid. "I am the one whose branches are broken," she writes in her Psalm.

 

Fran modeled her writing on Psalm 13 and reminded us that Biblical lament always ends with coming back to deep trust in God.

 

Denise came back to praise too, in her rhyming lament, and she shares the structure: "Protest, Petition, and Praise." 

NPM Day 2

You can read line 2 of the Progressive Poem here.

 

Here is the complete list of participants. There are 3 openings left at the end of the month. If you'd like to join us and write a line, visit Margaret Simon at this link and leave her a comment.

• April 1 Linda Mitchell at A Word Edgewise
• April 2 Tricia Stohr-Hunt at The Miss Rumphius Effect
• April 3 Robyn Hood Black at Life on the Deckle Edge
• April 4 Donna Smith at Mainely Write
• April 5 Denise Krebs at Dare to Care
• April 6 Buffy Silverman 
• April 7 Jone Rush MacCulloch
• April 8 Janice Scully at Salt City Verse
• April 9 Tabatha Yeatts at The Opposite of Indifference 
• April 10 Marcie Flinchum Atkins
• April 11 Rose Capelli at Imagine the Possibilities 
• April 12 Fran Haley at Lit Bits and Pieces
• April 13 Cathy Stenquist
• April 14 Janet Fagel at Mainely Write
• April 15 Carol Varsalona at Beyond LiteracyLink
• April 16 Amy Ludwig VanDerwater at The Poem Farm
• April 17 Kim Johnson at Common Threads
• April 18 Margaret at Reflections on the Teche
• April 19 Ramona at Pleasures from the Page
• April 20 Mary Lee at A(nother) Year of Reading
• April 21 Tanita Davis 
• April 22 Patricia Franz
• April 23 Ruth at There’s no such thing as a Godforsaken town
• April 24 Linda Kulp Trout 
• April 25 Heidi Mordhorst at My Juicy Little Universe
• April 26 Michelle Kogan 
• April 27 Linda Baie at Teacher Dance
• April 28
• April 29
• April 30

 

NPM Day 1

Today the annual Progressive Poem gets started over at Linda's blog, A Word Edgewise.

Reading Update

Book #13 of 2025 was Once a Queen, by Sarah Arthur. I heard someone on a podcast saying that this book was inspired by Queen Susan from the Narnia stories. It didn't fulfill all the expectations that raised in me, but I did enjoy it and I'd like to read the next book in the series. "What we thought was the final chapter is merely the prologue."

 

Book #14 was All the Colors of the Dark, by Chris Whitaker. I read this with my book group, and while the conversations about it were great as always, I didn't love this one. I found it confusing and implausible. 

Book #15 was The Lost Story, by Meg Shaffer. Like #13, I picked this book up because of its Narnia-adjacent promise. Again, I didn't find the promise fulfilled completely.

 

Book #16 was The Liturgy of the Ordinary, by Tish Harrison Warren, a reread. I picked this up to stop me from reading and rereading the news, and it really worked, calming my heart and mind. I'm already going through it again.

 

Book #17 was People We Meet on Vacation, by Emily Henry. This was light and entertaining.

 

Book #18 was another reread, Station Eleven, by Emily St. John Mandel. I read this before the pandemic, and loved it then. I think I liked it even more this time.

 

Book #19 was The Plan, by Kendra Adachi. I love Adachi's podcast, and this book has the same encouraging, friendly advice on time management. I was glad I had read it.

 

Book #20 was The Serviceberry, by Robin Wall Kimmerer. While not as good as Braiding Sweetgrass, one of the best books I read in 2021, this was very interesting and encouraging. It's about gift economies and how not everything is about scarcity and money. Just what I needed to read in this moment. 

Book #21 was another one I read with my book club, The Kitchen House, by Kathleen Grissom. This was very atmospheric, even though the atmosphere was grim in the extreme. The sad story, about people with no choice trapped in the horrific system of slavery, kept me reading until the last page.

 

Book #22 was Circle of Grace, by Jan Richardson. I love Richardson's poems, and I was so glad to read this book. I will reread it many times, I'm sure.

 

Book #23 was A Place for Us, by Fatima Farheen Mirza, a well-written and absorbing novel about an Indian Muslim family. 

Book #24 was The Wishing Game, by Meg Shaffer. kind of a Charlie and the Chocolate Factory for grownups. I enjoyed it a lot.

 

Book #25 was Congratulations, Who Are You Again?, by Harrison Scott Key. It's a memoir about how he became a writer, writing his first book, and the book tour. It was interesting, but it didn't help that I'd already read his more recent book. The information I had about what was coming couldn't be un-known.

 

Book #26 was A Place at the Table, by Miranda Harris and Jo Swinney. After Harris' tragic death in 2019, Swinney, her daughter, found a folder of a book she'd been working on about hospitality. Swinney finished the book and included excerpts from her mother's journals and letters. Harris and her husband founded the Christian conservation organization A Rocha. I loved this book. 

 

Reading Update

Book #5 of 2025 was Tell Me Everything, by Elizabeth Strout. I've mostly found that the books by Strout that I've read in the past have been about loneliness. This one had lonely people in it too, but it was also about friendships and how people interact with each other. 

Book #6 was The Comfort of Crows, by Margaret Renkl. I loved this gentle look at a backyard in Nashville. 

Book #7 was North Woods, by Daniel Mason. In this novel we see centuries of events in one small plot of ground in Western Massachusetts. I liked some sections more than others, but overall this kept me reading. I especially liked the ending.

 

Book #8 was This Motherless Land, by Nikki May. This was presented to me as a retelling of Mansfield Park, which intrigued me because I couldn't imagine an updating of that book. It's really not at all what I was expecting. The only Mansfield Park related thing is the unfortunate cousin coming to live with the wealthy cousins. Plus there are some people in it called the Bertrams. It was a good story, though, and I enjoyed the Nigeria/England aspect of it. 

Book #9 was The Last Battle, by C.S. Lewis. I reread the Narnia books in times of great stress, which this is turning out to be.

 

Book #10 was I Cheerfully Refuse, by Lief Enger. I really enjoyed this story set in the near future in the US. Everything has pretty much collapsed, including literacy, but the main character's wife, Lark, has a bookstore. And there's an epic boat trip. This was a perfect read for me.

 

Book #11 was Cutting for Stone, by Abraham Verghese. This is such an amazing book. I just read Verghese's more recent book, The Covenant of Water, and liked it so much that I had to go looking for this one too. It's set mostly in Ethiopia, which is a big draw for me, but I also loved the parts in the United States. Like the other novel, this one has a big focus on medical issues, but this one is about a mission hospital in Addis Ababa. At the end, Verghese mentions John Irving in his acknowledgements, and I thought, oh yeah, that's who this book reminded me of. Verghese has the same sense of the weirdness of individual humans. These characters are absolutely unforgettable and I just wish Verghese would write faster. 

Book #12 was The Book of Difficult Fruit: Arguments for the Tart, Tender, and Unruly (with recipes), by Kate Lebo. I expected this to be more poetry than it was. It was interesting to learn about the different fruits, but this was mostly a book of personal essays about Lebo's own experiences, not just with the fruits but with life in general.

Poetry Friday: Writing Group

I'm in a new writing group. I can hardly say it out loud. The last time I was in a writing group was when I was still in Haiti. By the time I left there, the members were already in several different time zones. It got too complicated to work out meetings. Now I'm meeting with someone (just two of us so far) in person, across from each other at a real wooden table instead of on Zoom. Is it real? It feels too good to be true.

We've only met once. We shared some work. Then the other group member showed me a poem she'd written in addition to her prose piece. It brought tears to my eyes. I asked to take a photo of it with my phone. She said yes, and I did. I remembered how much I love writing and being around writing, especially now that I'm teaching something different. 

I've written so little since moving here. I make myself do Birdtober and I've participated in the Poetry Month here (March), writing daily. I have a few things in my folder. But maybe I'll have more now.

Here's something I wrote in March. Like my friend's poem, it's about motherhood. Hers was better. But at least I wrote.

Bedtime


Then:
stories
songs
hugs and kisses
quiet

Now:
quiet

©Ruth Bowen Hersey

Miss Rumphius has this week's roundup.

Reading Update

Book #2 of 2025 was April's Grave, by Susan Howatch. This is a novel I'd never heard of before, and I thought I had read all of Susan Howatch's work. I found it among used books donated to a Ugandan NGO. Turns out there are a few more novellas like this one, published in 1974 and out of print. You can definitely see the Howatch style at work, but this is short, unlike her usual enormously long works. 

Book #3 was Light on Snow, by Anita Shreve. This is a terribly sad, but ultimately redemptive story of a father and daughter who find an abandoned baby.

Book #4 was The Covenant of Water, by Abraham Verghese. Set in South India, this is a sprawling story of multiple generations of a family. I found it on several end-of-year lists for 2024, and inevitably it was named as a favorite. It was so good and so absorbing that now I will definitely have to read his other book that everyone is always talking about, Cutting for Stone.