Lisa A. Kramer

by Lisa A Kramer, in Poetry , Writing

I have a friend who meets with me for a mini-writing group of sorts. We talk, share our writing dreams, sometimes  share things we've been working on, and then give each other a quick writing challenge.

Yesterday, I dragged my brother along, as he is with me, since he is here playing "Uncle Dad" to help out in this week of insanity. As we talked, he wrote a stream-of-consciousness blog post that reflected some of our conversation. When it was time to write, he suggested we do one of those group poem experiments, where one person writes a line, only allowing the next person to see the last word. The next person writes a line with that word as inspiration and so on. Steve and I had done one of these before at the botanical gardens, which I posted on the old blog on the fateful day when the bombs exploded at the Boston Marathon.

To get us started on our writing experiment, we decided to look for a quote to inspire us first. We took a random quote from a collection of poems by Garrison Keeler:

"One night they both needed different things of a similar kind."

In between writing my lines, I worked on a Zentangle to prevent myself from over-analyzing the quality of my words.

The following is the result of our experiment. Not a perfect poem, but interesting all the same:

***

They needed connection but not with each other.

While I felt desperate needs for certain kinds of affirmations, his needs were far different. It's amazing, knowing that, now, that they have somehow, in these many years, developed a life which each of them can actually stand.

The toughest of decisions. Lay down? Let it wash over and hope for the best? Or find the strength within.

The problem lay in misunderstanding of the themselves and each other; hidden thought lying deep within never brought out to bathe in the light. They hid behind the corners of their own darkness.

Morning always turns into night. It just always does. Inevitably, the sun always becomes obliterated by the clouds.

I see a rock. But with a sudden twist of the eye it becomes a dragon and then shifts just so and it becomes a dream.

They need to learn to dream together again, but to do that they needed to find peace with their time alone . . .

but together, however different, they came to truly believe what they already knew at the beginning--that together, when they joined their strengths and their weaknesses, they became

Become, be. Where does it begin? Where does it end? When does be become do?

Neither one knew the answer.

We may never have all the answers. Maybe not even most of them. What has become important, is that we have learned to trust ourselves.

Lisa, Tammie, Steve  June 5,   2013

Any guesses who wrote which lines?

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