Hail Mary

Hail Mary,

full of grace and
dusted in pollen. I was 
surprised to find you here,
hands calcified in prayer. 
I have been that woman, too—
that weeping stone
in the greening woods.  

The Prompt

I have a confession: I wrote this poem several months ago. I’m working on a new poem this morning, but I can feel the pressure to finish it and the pressure to write something shareable blocking my flow and killing my fun, so I decided to let myself off the hook and dig into the archive of poems that I’ve written this year and not yet shared. I’m telling you all this because maybe you can relate? Maybe you put pressure on yourself to churn out a certain number of poems or to ensure that every poem glows with a certain luster. Effort and striving have their place, but so do ease, play, and willingness to ride the ebbing, flowing waves that are part of every creative life. Be kind to yourself, friends.

Now on to today’s prompt! In September 2021, I spent a few days cloistered away at the Abbey of Gethsemani. I rested, wrote, read my first ever book of poetry (David Whyte’s “Essentials”), and strolled through the woods, where I was startled more than once to round a bend and find myself eye-to-eyeless with a statue of Mary or this or that saint. Reflecting on that experience more recently, I took a scroll through my camera roll, found the picture I shared above, and wrote that little poem.

If you’d like a prompt to play with, then I invite you to spend some time in your camera roll, too (or any other photo archive you possess). It might be especially interesting to scroll back a ways, so that you stumble into pictures whose context you’ve forgotten. Choose a picture or two or three that grab you. Or if it feels hard to decide which photo to choose and you need help narrowing it down, you could challenge yourself by closing your eyes, scrolling back, then opening your eyes to see what you landed on.

From there, you might explore any number of paths. You might allow yourself to relive what you remember of the experience that the photo portrays, noticing what sensory details emerge beyond what’s present in the photo. Or you might play in a very different direction—looking at the picture as if you’ve never seen it before, as if you have no knowledge of its subject. If you look at this picture through the eyes of a stranger, what do you see? What guesses might you make about the context? What story might you weave around it?

If you feel pulled by more than one picture, is there a story that your collection of photos tells? Is there a color or shape or theme that runs through all of them? What metaphor might connect them? What feeling?

I look forward to reading the poems that emerge from all of this! If you’d like to share the photo or photos that inspired your poetry, you can do so in the subscriber chat.