Friends, I’m leading a FREE creative writing workshop via Zoom this coming Friday, March 20, 1-4 pm Central Time. Rewriting the Story, Reclaiming the Self is designed for anyone living with the memories of abuse: bullying, domestic violence, an emotionally abusive relationship, a sexual or physical assault. I’d love to see you in the room. Email me if you’d like to sign up. 

Sort through blackberries. Pick out ones too far gone and toss them into a compost pail. Next to you other volunteers bag mushrooms, sort apples, count boxes of organic greens and other donated supplies. How many people will this one afternoon of work feed? Not enough, you think, and suddenly your blackberry task seems so dumb. Futile.

When your own government seems bent on destroying everything you’ve worked for your whole life, when people you didn’t elect and despise are dropping bombs on little kids, are swinging their heedless wrecking balls against everything you hold dear, how can you feel anything but despair?

That’s how they want you to feel, Alison, you tell yourself, for the thousandth time, and you look up from the blackberries, around the big room filled with people working steadily to help others, to take care of them when the people who control the money won’t. This is the flip side of the brutality coin. This is what you have to remind yourself of, every day, all day.

Most of us don’t want to cut down the nests. Keep going, you tell yourself, and you do.

Choices, by Tess Gallagher

I go to the mountain side
of the house to cut saplings,
and clear a view to snow
on the mountain. But when I look up,
saw in hand, I see a nest clutched in
the uppermost branches.
I don’t cut that one.
I don’t cut the others either.
Suddenly, in every tree,   
an unseen nest
where a mountain   
would be. 

                              (for Drago Štambuk)

Click here for more information about poet and short story writer Tess Gallagher. Today’s poem appears in her collection Midnight Lantern: New and Selected Poems, published in 2011 by Graywolf Press. 

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