And the Winner Is

And the Winner Is

Six-thirty on a frosty May morning, after
nearly 22 hours of teams walking the track
at Relay for Life. The much-too-cheery 
announcer, our local news anchor Jim,
plunges us sleepyheads into a river 
of words, forces us out of cozy sleeping 
bags and from our temporary shelters
with the promise of breakfast 
and the guarantee of fun and prizes. 
The Bed Head Contest is about to begin.
Swathed in blankets and quilts, 
contestants pour forth, some young,
some adults. All wear pride on their faces.
There’s something about a Good Cause
that makes ordinary people rise, sends
them off uncaring about the disarray
they’d never display any other time.

Co-founder of Creative Roots Foundation, Joan Raymond, kindly inspired today’s poetry with her brave photo.

Whirlwind

Whirlwind

I was so busy. So busy.
No one could pin me down for a visit
No chance of a leisurely meal in an upscale
place with the Muzak my mother listened to
when she wasn’t singing with Charley Pride.
No time for phone calls, short or chatty
No sipping of tea, let it cool, slug it down
No walks in the park for a dose of greening
No cuddles with the cat
Why did I even have a cat?
Too busy.

This poem began with a line from a poem I read today. Once I got going, I changed that opening line and kept writing. Sometimes we need a bit of a kick-start.

Ode to the Nashville Library

It was the spring of 2002, when on vacation
I landed in downtown Nashville, a bibliophile
unable to bypass the library’s main branch.

If the sculpture in the courtyard, a twenty-foot-tall 
stone book tower, wasn’t breathtaking enough, 
didn’t draw me to the massive bronze sculpted doors, 


the Grand Reading Room walls glowed with the patina 
of hammered copper repoussé panels of Nashville’s
history lining the perimeter above the bookshelves.

Uplifted and inspired, I longed to wander, to read, 
to study here, to break out my journal and write.

Today’s photo prompt from Creative Roots Foundation took me back twenty-two years to a cross-country road trip and a stop in Nashville, where I fell in love with their downtown library.