Poetic Prose – Feminism and Religion

The John Howard Society: Poetic Justness & Hope by Margot Van Sluytman

COMMUNITY

Unexpected comfort
Permeated raw, cold ache.
Warmth melted sorrow.
Embraced we are.
Once again
Knowing we are loved.
And loving too.
©Margot Van Sluytman

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“Supporting neighbours. Protecting communities. Providing supports. Rebuilding lives.”
Donna De Jong, Executive Director of The John Howard Society, Hamilton-Burlington, Ontario, Canada.
~~~

I think often about why and how community matters. About joy and justice and hope and healing. And indeed, the importance of spaces such as our own here on FAR, this community of poets, writers, artists, activists, advocates, allies, academics. Each whose choice to put pen to page, affords light and life to throb and to thrive.

In My End: My Beginning by Margot Van Sluytman

In my end is my beginning.
T. S. Eliot

This year two colleagues of mine died. And my heart roared. Tears aplenty accompanied me. Poet that I am. Word-lover. Image-seeker. Meaning-making-hound-dog. Doggedly seeking a place to plant myself so that the ache of these losses within the crucible in which I find myself grounded, honed, chiselled, challenged, challenging, writing, wording, rewording, sculpting relationship with my students, who are too my teachers, is soothed. By tiny shards. Soothed. And death finds home everywhere. In each nook. Cranny. Crevice. Concreted crenellation or grassy llano, there she be.

What research, I ask myself, can we do when the heart fails to cease its eking, leaking ache, and crushing sorrow? What academic skill need we birth, resurrect, divine in order to erase this over-whelming tsunami of acknowledging our finitude? Where to look? What book? What paper? What journal? To what podcast need we creep, crawl, scurry, bound, fling ourselves in order to quell brutal, blistering despair? Self-immolation cannot work, for too, too many teeming tears douse the flames.

Refuge by Sara Wright

Refuge is a place I go to be with other forests. A blessed place…even when I have a dog that is dying. Two free writes from the field where Nature is Queen of May and June…