#adele kenny

The Trains

We felt them first. Fingers pressed to the rails,     a dull rumble filled our hands and hummed into our arms before the cone of light, the great clatter

of metal against metal. Trestled high, above the     bridge on Grand Avenue, we knew those tracks went on forever, between trees that lined the ties

like stations of the cross. The hill was forbidden but     holy, thick with clover, ripe with berries in spring. The year I was nine, an April blizzard swept the

sky and we went to the trains in the dark. The wires     strummed into sparks, the rails were a dazzle of shadows. Our faces – ghosts of our selves – reflected

in every train car window, lines of breath etched in     passing glass. Above us, chimney smoke hung like smears of candle grease among the clouds.

We were grubby and poor, but we believed. We said     our prayers, ate fish on Fridays, and never rode those trains. We could only kneel in something like

Adele Kenny has a wonderfully inspiring poetry blog The Music In It: Adele Kenny’s Poetry Blog chock full of over 300 writing prompts, including her most recent post entitled Prompt #349 – Writing in Stressful Times: The Covid-19 Pandemic. She gives helpful commentary, quotes, resources, and several writing exercises and/or prompts in each post.

You can scroll through her past prompts by visiting…

For me, and I suspect for many, gratitude is a necessary part of the process. Of course, it’s hard to be grateful when you stand on the edge of crash and burn. One day you’re simply living your life and the next you’re faced with something you didn’t anticipate and aren’t sure you can deal with. It happens to all of us sooner or later, in one way or another. Surviving becomes part of the trek, but it’s a lonely walk no matter how much support you have. Faced with fear, grief, loss, or illness, where do you go? You either give into the darkness of it all, or you look for a way out. Acceptance is part of the way back up—a grace that can lead to gratitude. (Stay with me, I’m working toward rejoicing.) There’s so much for which to be grateful (one more hour, one more day). Learning how to be grateful is another instrument in the survival toolbox. If you can manage gratefulness, you can begin to move away from the damages of what you work to survive. It’s kind of like when the feeling of the subject matter becomes the poem. You remember how to live, you remember what happiness is, and that projects itself backward and forward. Slowly, you begin to rejoice in whatever happiness and love you can find. What do we live for? From the poem:

Grace is acceptance—

all of it, whatever is—as

in we live for this: love

and gratitude enough.

Guest Post on ‘The Music In It’

I wrote a guest post for Adele Kenny’s poetry blog, The Music In It, about my daily writing practice this year and the ronka poems.

It is a good exercise to get “meta” about your writing once in awhile and think about what you write and why. Treat yourself as an assignment from that poetry class and look at the themes that run through your poems, the language etc.  (I didn’t realize how many…

Adele kindly asked me to post a prompt to her lovely poetry blog, The Music In It. I had fun with it and offered four ways in to the ever-elusive love poem.