“Advent candles” by Markus Grossalber is licensed under CC BY 2.0
My National Writing Project friend Deanna has been gathering teachers and writers together online pretty regularly, to inspire and connect. I’ve missed every one of her online sessions but I have used her prompts and poems as threads for my own small poems each morning. I am most appreciative, too.
For December, she posted and shared a slideshow of an Advent calendar, and I used those poems for a poem response each morning for 25 days (I have missed at least one; I’m not sure – but I see I used one poem, twice). I wrote these poems each morning elsewhere but now I want to curate them together.
First, my last poem – a gift of thanks to Deanna.
Now, here are the titles of the original poems with links back to my responses. You can read the originals either through Deanna’s presentation or there are direct links at the bottom of the page to each of my poems, winding a path back to the original:
- “First Coming” by Madeline L’Engle – my poetic response
- “First Light” by Richard Bauckham – my poetic response
- “On Joy and Sorrow” by Kahlil Gibran – my poetic response
- “Remembered Light” by Clark Ashton Smith – my poetic response (second cadence)
- “Altars of Light” by Pierre Joris – my poetic response
- “Holding the Light” by Stuart Kestenbaum – my poetic response
- “little prayer” by Danez Smith – my poetic response
- “My Tenant” by Philip M. Raskin – my poetic response
- “O” by Mary Sidney Herbert – my poetic response
- “Rally” by Elizabeth Alexander – my poetic response
- “Wait” by Galway Kinnell – my poetic response
- “May Perpetual Light Shine” by Patricia Spears Jones – my poetic response
- “Field Note” by Eric Pankey – my poetic response
- “Sunday Before Advent” by Christina Rossetti – my poetic response
- “When I Rise Up” by Georgia Douglas Johnson – my poetic response
- “I Am Offering This Poem” by Jimmy Santiago Baca – my poetic response
- “A Journey” by Nikki Giovanni – my poetic response
- “Bread” by Linda Pastan – my poetic response
- “A House Called Tomorrow” by Alberto Rios – my poetic response
- “Hope” by Ali Liebegott – my poetic response
- “Remembered Light” by Clark Ashton Smith – my poetic response (first cadence)
- “How To Get Riches” by Benjamin Franklin – my poetic response
Peace (together),
Kevin