Fall Session Writing Lab - Week #6 - Departure

Engaging the Active Imagination: Writing as Activism (Fall Session)

Writing prompt

• Describe the view from your point of departure

Departure (Poem draft)

You walk the cliff's edge

to the place where what you've gained

you no longer hold and what you've lost

you cannot mourn because your journey

was meant to travel beyond acquisition

From this point you survey the vastness

and yearn for the calls from the unknown

when you realize you can't turn around when

the glares and shouts threaten to nail down

the canned heat long hidden in your heels

The outstretched arch of memory and the scope

of the contours of your soaring experience

have carved out the framework of lifetimes to come

and all you have to do is step forward.

Fall Session Writing Lab - Week #5 - Democracy

Engaging the Active Imagination: Writing as Activism (Fall Session)

Writing prompt

• Voice your ideas for democracy

The citizens storm city hall wielding justice, accountability and action.

The administration shouts them down with allegations of disrespect, disruption and apathy.

To which the citizens reply, Do you know what apathy means?

A staunch indifference to the unimportant.

If the majority rules, it's the majority of dissent.

Fall Session Writing Lab - Week #4 - Displacement

Engaging the Active Imagination: Writing as Activism (Fall Session)

Writing prompt

• Describe your own feelings of displacement

Displacement (Poem: draft)

Mother, father, sister, brother.

Brothers, the two of them. Slowly,

all begin to drift, fingers slip,

hands once clasped in time now drag

along the weeds.

The field hollers fade and

the night fire camp songs

are sung to the burning oak bark

and no one else.

Foot steps crush the crumpled bed of leaves

but the faint echoes repel against no living thing.
(to be cont'd...)