Second Night

I was ready to go back to the chapel and I was usually the first one to arrive. I waited in my car for Penny to come and turn on the lights. Sitting there, I could see the shadow of the chapel facade-it looked huge from a distance-I sat with my lights off and window rolled down to take in the night. There was the occasional flash of car lights on Ft. Lowell, but mostly silence and cold night air.

Somehow I thought it would be most authentic if we wrote sitting in the hard little pews of the chapel, and I think we discovered that this was a good place to begin each week's session, sitting right in front of San Pedro. We usually began our discussion there and we passed around our rewrites and shared the revisions we'd done of last week's work.

That second night we did a visualization activity that would lead us into a poem. I asked participants to close their eyes and place themselves either inside or outside one of the windows. Then I lead them through the visualization and we wrote for 20 minutes after that. We moved out of the chapel after this and into the small adobe room in the back which had a table. I asked participants to share their writing and to experiment with line breaks. This was hard for some but mostly everyone enjoyed it. Then, rather than the usual "stealing" from one another, I suggested that each person "give" one of his/her lines or ideas to someone else. This idea comes from Tilly Warnock. This sudden reversal of energy away from taking to giving really had a positive effect. Each participant explained their gift of words and ideas to the other and I think each of us felt a special significance in how we would compose with those "gifted" words. Throughout the session there was much laughter and joking. Fran wasn't sure she had written a poem and Carol wasn't too happy with her work either. For me this activity was probably one of the most stimulating. What follows are the poems that developed out of that exercise.

Descriptions: The following pieces represent a wide range of responses to the "window prompt." This exercise allowed participants our individual inspirations that were at times a meditation on some aspect of the chapel or some aspect of our own past life.

Carol's poem focuses on the musical traditions of the chapel and its songs; Sandra's poem expresses grief over a child she remembers from long ago;
Bill's poem is a meditation on the "back door" and how this figures importantly into the chapel's daily workings; Penny's poem evokes the beauty of the surrounding area and the beauty of the adobe in desert rain;
Fran's poem describes another time in her life and her devotion to a maple tree that grew outside her window.

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