Welcome to the Abbey’s 61st Poetry Party!
I select an image and suggest a theme/title and invite you to respond with your own poem. Scroll down and add it in the comments section below. Feel free to take your poem in any direction and then post the image and invitation on your blog (if you have one), Facebook, or Twitter, and encourage others to come join the party! (If you repost the photo, please make sure to include the credit link below it and link back to this post inviting others to join us).
Each month we have a new theme and for October it is hospitality, drawn from the second principle of the Monk Manifesto: “I commit to radical acts of hospitality by welcoming the stranger both without and within. I recognize that when I make space inside my heart for the unclaimed parts of myself, I cultivate compassion and the ability to accept those places in others.”
Write a poem about this
commitment and desire.
What is it that you are called to welcome within?
What are the challenging voices knocking on your inner (and outer) door?
What happens when you begin a conversation willing to be changed by what you hear?
Photo Credit: Steven Elliott (please use this credit if you repost this invitation on your blog and link back to the Abbey as well – thank you!)
Share your poem below in the comments with the Abbey community.
On Sunday, October 19th, I will select one name at random from the submissions and the winner will receive a space in my upcoming online retreat – Honoring Saints and Ancestors: Peering through the Veil
October’s theme is Hospitality (Abbey Resources):
- Introduction to the theme
- Invitation to Photography (with Flickr pool link)
- Patheos article on Radical Hospitality and Holy Disruption
29 Responses
I am part of the circle, the known and loving circle
How beautiful it is
I come for refreshment, to share in song, to play at ease.
A sudden commotion,
An upheaval.
A new voice, a different language, a wind at the door!
You knock…
‘Please. open the door, make room for me too!’
My heart is broken open
And I must listen now.
The circle widens, water spills,
And golden light flows in.
Light and shadow, to and fro,
The dance is all.
Why is it that the people I love most
are the hardest to be with?
I can cherish their presence in my life
and yet want to get away from them
and take my space
longing for privacy and quiet
but living with loneliness & unspoken pain
Such an odd combination
of affection & annoyance
warmth and crankiness
joy and anguish
togetherness and crowdedness
Will we ever get it right?
So much fear to lose them
so much desire to escape them
God we are a weird bunch…..
Even the various characters within me
dance this stumbling lack of harmony
inhospitable bickering inner selves
friendly warrior cheering parts
oh so wondrous whispers of gentle divinity
mixed with crabby skeptic me
maybe I can take this inner family
to a food fight party
so they can celebrate and frustrate
with wild abandon
and come out laughing with relief
at the jolly mess of love……
Sensing something
Peering through a dark window
Something, something,…..or someone
I turn…then, hear a knock
Waiting for the light–in the light I can greet
and may … even welcome fear.
In silence, I find the cold darkness remains
Then the knock-the knock-the knock
My prayer, my anger, my fear, my loneliness
paralyze me inside…outside. Forsaken…
Only hospitality…opening…welcoming the knocking
I discover it is “the light” in the darkness
You approach and I wonder inside
Are you like me, or are you not?
But then I realize
It doesn’t really matter,
We’re all one.
… called to welcome in the silent flutters of my heart xoxo