Poetry Friday: More about Hope

I am once again doing a Photo-a-Day project this year. For a few years I've been doing a daily photo on social media during Lent and Advent, and I noticed how it gave me a little boost every day and helped me start my mornings in a creative frame of mind. I went looking for some daily prompts that would last from January through December. Now it's my fourth year of this practice, but my first with a new set of prompts. I was using the Capture Your 365 prompts, but the owner, Katrina, closed that business at the end of last year. There's a new site now called 365 Picture Today, and that's where I'm getting my prompts for 2020. They're using the National Holiday Calendar, and each day they have taken one of the observations, some of which are serious and some frivolous, and turned it into a prompt.

Thursday this week (today, as I'm writing this post) was Handwriting Day. It was also a color day (there's one every month) and today's color was red. I wrote out a Lisel Miller poem I first read on Tabatha's blog, The Opposite of Indifference, in red, and then took a picture of it with some potatoes. I didn't have any of the other things referenced in the poem, like earthworms, or maple seeds, or mushrooms, or dandelions, but I did have ordinary, common, dull as dirt potatoes. And really, what better metaphor for hope could there be?

Here's a link to the text on the Writer's Almanac site.

I think hope has to be ordinary, because you have to keep mustering it again and again, day after day. If it were something exotic and rare, like a peacock landing on your roof, it would be hard to wait around for it. But if you can find it in your pantry, still with a little bit of soil on it from the earth, it's a lot more achievable.

On Thursday morning when I awoke, early, it was raining. It doesn't usually rain much in January here in Haiti, and it made me think of the Canterbury Tales, "Whan that Aprille with his shoures soote, The droghte of March hath perced to the roote," (When April with its sweet showers has pierced the drought of March to the root), except it would be January's drought that was being pierced. The rain felt hopeful, though not spectacular, more ordinary like potatoes, and it corresponded with a lot of other happy and hopeful thoughts. Those thoughts led to this haiku:

Dry, dusty season
pierced as soaking morning rain
fills up new puddles

Ruts in the road, the ordinary places of life, can become new puddles, new sources of life and joy. That's hopeful. That's joyful. That's worth a little poetry.

And here's today's roundup.