By Margaret Flaherty, written November 2023
This past September [in 2023], I attended a writing retreat at Zigbone Farm in Sabillasville, Maryland. Every day began with a 20-minute silent meditation. After the meditation, I would walk past fields of feathered grasses and spiky wildflowers: goldenrod, chicory, Queen Anne’s Lace, false buckwheat, and lavender thistles. It was heavenly. On my first walk, these lines appeared in my mind:
I’m afraid of silence. / Every time I draw near, / tears fall.
I was so surprised. I love silence. Why would I be afraid of it?
Later that day, back at Zigbone Farm, we were prompted to observe something natural—a tree, a flower, a rock, an animal—and write a poem describing what we’d observed as precisely and concretely as we could. I paid close attention to the lavender-flowered thistles that towered over weeds and wildflowers along the road. Somehow, the line I’d heard about silence engaged with the image of thistles and, voila, I had the start of poem I never would have imagined absent the meditation and the prompt. I found this intriguing. Every day thereafter at the retreat, when I meditated and took my walk, I would notice that phrases or lines of poetry would effortlessly appear. Was this a coincidence or had I stumbled on a connection between meditation, movement, and poetry?
Like most writers, I’ve always noticed a connection between walking and coming up with lines or words I can use in a poem. But I was less familiar with meditation. I canvased other poets and asked if they meditated, and if they did, what effect, if any, does it have on their writing. A few reported that meditation helps clear away distractions so they can tune into their truest voice. One said silence allows her to unburden her consciousness, so she has access to her most creative self. Another cautioned she goes so deep in meditation; she sometimes loses her words and has to wait a while for them to return.
Religious friends told me about “centering prayer,” a form of meditation in which you repeat a sacred word. I tried this and, after a few false starts, landed on “peace.” This turns out to be a fruitful meditation practice for me, especially in this unsettling time of war. The susurrating repetition of “peace” calms my anxious mind and I find myself more aware, more open to the phrases or possible lines of poetry that bubble up.
Recently, I’ve added the following three-step prompt (adapted from an online class) to my meditation/walking practice:
1. Write a poem that utilizes only end-stopped lines, then reconfigure the poem using enjambment. Notice how it changes the poem.
2. Write the poem in any lineated style, then reconfigure it into unlined prose.
3. Reconfigure the poem from prose into a new lineated form without looking at the original.
Did your intention or goals for the poem change during these iterations? To which I added, did you discover something hiding in the poem you didn’t know was there?
I'll admit, following this prompt practice is a lot of work, and I don’t have enough time to follow it for every poem I write. But I like how it forces me to pay close attention to the flow of the lines, the narrative undercurrents, and the poem’s rhythm. It also helps me spot when I’m leaning on a pattern or structure that is keeping the poem from going where it wants to go. As a retired lawyer with an ingrained habit of imposing logical structure on what I write, questioning pattern and structure helps me to loosen up.
James Baldwin wrote that “every writer has only one tale to tell, and . . . has to find a way of telling it until the meaning becomes clearer and clearer, until the story becomes at once more narrow and larger, more and more precise, more and more reverberating.” At least for me, a meditation/walking practice combined with an iterative prompt, like the one above, helps me to dig more deeply into the tale I write to tell and offers a path toward making what my poems mean clearer and more precise to me, and hopefully, to readers.
Here is the poem that came out of my meditation/walking practice:
Transmutations
I fear silence; if I draw near, tears fall.
I’d rather be brave as chicory, roadside sentry,
aster blue vagrant. Or evasive
& crouch under glitter-webs & false
buckwheat’s seedy chandeliers; camouflage
my self a savage shade of purple.
Should silence spot me encircled
by goldenrod & spiked grasses, I’d make my
edges sharp as bristled lavender
thistle, armor my center with braided
brambles from briar thickets girdling Grimm’s
gray castle. I’d be opaque as
the ancient portcullis guarding the keep where tears
fall, condense & transmute to jewels in silver caskets.
Maggie Flaherty began writing poems in high school but stopped for a busy 50 years or so. In 2016, after retiring, she attended a workshop taught by the poet and essayist Lia Purpura at the Haystack Mountain School of Crafts. There, her interest in poetry returned like a homing pigeon. In 2020, she graduated from the Rainier Writing Workshop at Pacific Lutheran University with a masters in poetry. These days, Maggie works in the garden or watches the birds. That’s where many of her poems begin: in the always-changing weather. She has published poems in Passager and Yellow Arrow Vignette AWAKEN. Maggie recently won first prize in the Bethesda Urban Partnership’s 2023 poetry competition.
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