  Poetry
This week: Look Back before You Look Ahead... Edited by: fyn  
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The new year stands before us, like a chapter in a book, waiting to be written. We can help write that story by setting goals.~~Melody Beattie
Write it on your heart that every day is the best day in the year.~~Ralph Waldo Emerson
And suns grow meek, and the meek suns grow brief, and the year smiles as it draws near its death.~~William C. Bryant
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I don't know about you, but I scribble thoughts on my desk blotter-calendar. I write stuff on the wall calendar. Other things land haphazardly in my journal or in my blog. Before I toss the old ones and put up the new calendars, before I clean out the various inboxes and delete the accumulated detritus of the past year, I look back.
Before I can look ahead, before I can plan a 2016, I need to finish my 2015 out by looking back. What happened this year? What did I do? Which goals that I set got lost by the wayside and which were accomplished. I spend some time thinking, remembering, memorializing (if you will) those people that crossed over in 2015. I clean out the memory backs, dust off the brain cells and clean out my 'junque' drawers - both physical and mental.
Some of my best poetic ideas have come from the 'looking back.' Odd phrases, that friend who passed, that odd moment, that funny (if embarrassing) story: all are fodder for my muse to mull over. New friends, accomplishments great and small, missed opportunities, special happenings: all can spark a phrase or a line that may start a fire in my mind and light a poem into being.
Contests I won and lost, poems I meant to write, (but they never jelled) or thoughts I meant to express are pulled from the ether into the now before they are lost forever. It isn't a quick process. I get sidetracked!
I take down the tree. Putting each special ornament in its place, I take extra time to remember, think about or ponder on those who gifted them to us, to the occasion when we bought it, to the memories associated with it. Putting away Christmas, packing its decorations carefully, taking down the mistletoe, boxing the myriad strings of lights, I feel no dimness that the day has come and gone, because in our house, it lingers throughout the year. No eyebrows are raised at a Christmas carol sung in May or August. No one thinks twice when by February, I've already tucked away a present for next Christmas. Christmastime is a feeling that simply exists year round.
So, now tis Tuesday evening and I need to finish this newsletter. Calendars gone through, inboxes semi-decluttered, yearly phone calls made and savored and I just ate the last Christmas cookie. All day my mind has begun to look ahead. New authors, new books, finishing some, starting the new. I so love what I do. I love the 'Christmas morning' look of glee and joy when an author holds their book for the first time...very special indeed! I am thinking on back porch roof replacement (ugh) and possible trips, if this will be the year my company can afford to finally get that billboard, and upcoming events. I'm beginning to get excited about an upcoming month-long contest (see below) and the 2016 WdC Anthology.
So as the year winds down, as December winds groan into January and a new year begins, don't toss the detritus of 2015, but paw through it and see what you might glean to write about, what you might have missed, what needs to be remembered and then toss the rest into a back corner of your mind. Missed seeds may yet put forth shoots and grow. |
Can you handle one of the hardest contests on WdC?
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A response to the last Construct Cup!
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Natechia dos Reis  says: I enjoyed reading your newsletter. In my writing classes we were asked to personify emotions, seasons and certain types of people like fallen soldiers. As you said use all your senses to place yourself in their shoes. I loved this exercise. I wrote letters to death, winter and war. I love the challenge of the color poem. I will give it a try. Thanks again for the inspirational and helpful words.
And did you?
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Poetry: December 30, 2015 Issue [#7390]
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