Gosia! I'm so glad you're spreading the word about your risographs. The ones I have are brightening up my home and I love them. And I think that taking time to put the writing you've done out into the world is a really important step--regardless. And you have written so much... you never know where steps like this will lead. Thanks for sharing your process :)
Poetry in French and English.
La neige, aux sourires
du soleil chante,
rigole et pleur en retrouvant
son amour la terre
qui s’effondre à son tour,
et libère
ce tapis de vie sous
la caresse
fragile
de nos pieds.
The snow, with the smiles
of the sun sings,
laughs and cries finding
her love the earth
who collapses in turn
and frees
this carpet of life under
the fragile
caress
of our feet.
Author’s note: I am lucky to be working with Jessica Tefenkgi Ruelle on her upcoming book on mindfulness and language learning.
She had a writing prompt for French learners that I found…
Objects you can hold in your hand and a Vagabond Voices writing prompt…
Panning for Gold…
Tiny heavy chunks of
rock, catch the light
gold, fool’s gold hard
to tell she held the pan, imagined
sloshing over the side, mud
sifting away and only
heavy things being
left. So simple. The fading
light, the shifting, passing pleasure —
innocence. For the longest time,
they didn’t even think
to go down to the singing
river. Maybe the heavy shiny
things are best left
under the
dust.
What would luck look like if you held it in your hands?
A reversal of fortune, the object you noticed on the street, on the seat of the bus abandoned…
Fiction from a village under the snow.
This is not our place. We are not hunters ready to enjoy a long winter sipping spirits and staring into the fire. We never feel quite at ease under the sliding glassy gaze of weasels, badgers, foxes, squirrels, deer on the alter to taxidermy. Furry monuments to hunting seasons past. Their eyes remind me of my own, sleep-deprived gaze, skimming the mid-distance, avoiding eye contact, yearning to close for an hour or an eternity.
My mind wanders when I come here. More than usual. It takes me a moment to reply when spoken to. I should be finding a way…
Poetry from the southern winds
Un ciel qui prend des tons
ocre, chargé de sable,
visage voilé, regard tamisé,
Sahara, cette danseuse, emportée
par les vents, et avec chaque baiser,
teintant de jaune nos joues nimbées.
A sky that takes tones
ocher, loaded with sand,
face veiled, gaze sifted,
Sahara, this dancer, carried away
by the winds, and with every kiss,
tinting our haloed cheeks yellow.
This is a found poem that I wrote after I went out cross country skiing and found myself watching sand sift down from the mountaintops and gliding over the gold-dusted snow. I kept thinking of the Sahara, finally, not…
Free Verse Poetry
We are form
baked in red
clay not set
in storm
stone thirsting,
singing to the
waters that will
undo this artist’s
first caress
in mud
may we be
reborn
This is a (belated) response to the Literary Impulse writing prompt, Andoumboulou and Vorfreude. These words, these sounds, and these concepts made me want to play with the music in the words forever, allowing no rough edges, no full stops, nothing final or finite.
Thank you Sylvia Wohlfarth for sending me this beautiful invitation to write about Andoumboulou, a word that sounds as beautiful as its meaning…a rough draft of…
(A Vagabond Voices writing and living prompt)
One line from my reading…and my life.
I remember
holding my first
when he was a baby, how
happyhe was a white basket,
fresh
rice cakes on New Year’s —
soft as warm
dough.
— One line poetry adapted from a line from the novel Pachinko by Min Jin Lee.
My challenge to you? Take a page…or a line from a book that gets you through it all.
How will you do this?
Perhaps with a one-line poem? A collage? A bit of blackout?(Just be sure to reference the book and author, please.)
Maybe you’ll write a story or poem where a book is one of the characters…or takes on a surprising role…
Maybe you’ve got the…
Vagabond Voices Writing and Living Prompt
On creativity, community, resilience, creative acts that get us through…
And holding your words in my hands.
Again. Again.
Times when I stared into the vast
and open unknown
wondered if I would be the abyss
but when I felt the tug of fear, I tied
a knot in my thread, one
upon another until
I held
this woolen reassurance:
words, and love
in my hands,
shelter.
What are the repetitions that get you through?
It has occurred to me, in the face of everything that we have left behind and everything that still lies ahead…are we not a series of repetitions?
Those tiny things we do again. Again.
That…
A poetic story
Don’t they know? This is their last run for a long time in these woods, their last chance to meet friends, or anyone else. The lasts are rustling from the trees, drifting and whispering underfoot.
The children are running loops and spirals around us sometimes bursting through a lingering stroke of yellow, at other times, melting into the crimson background. At times I guess by the padded rhythm of their feet that they are lost in the deep earth tones.
Alexis is two steps ahead of me shuffling her feet through the leaves, her wool coat reaching ever closer to…
Vagabond Voices writing and living prompt.
This is True
Where is the journey
from who we are to
who we must be to weather
the cycle to come?
Where is the dirt
path, the wisdom
of elders?
This is true,
they would say,
were they here.
Where are the nights
alone screaming up
at the stars as yuccas
stab into the cosmos.
Where is the sweat
lodge, body, melting,
purified, essence discovered?
Where is the lone
traveler tearing
through borders like rice paper,
pushing past the caligraphy
that spiders and scrawls over
maps, seeking the other
that she may know
herself?
Where?
Rite of Passage — what does that mean to you?
What…
Trisha Traughber
Immigrant, bilingual, mother, teacher, book-worm, writer. Life is better when we create - together.
