Daily Prompt Catch-Up <3 Fathers
19 June 2016
“I buried my father/in the sky./Since then, the birds/clean and comb him every morning”~Li-Young Lee
Make art about fathers.
Posts tagged ‘grief’
The Birds of Grief
This week I keep going back to a poem I wrote a couple of years ago, about grief, about sheer physicality of grief and loss. About feeling helpless. About how loss, no matter what, belongs to all of us.
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I Want to Bring the Birds
inside, hold them in my hands, tuck them inside my shirt, claws and all, feel the sharp tic of each frightened beak, surround them with my fingers, cradle them against the cage of my ribs, whisper shh shh shh—until they each find and linger in their place: the titmice tatting nests into my hair, crested sparrows and juncos perched and singing from my feet, the jays who see me as so much meat, supplier of suet and otherwise foolish and useless, each take a shoulder, their alarm squawk sudden and hard as a couple of crows stand sentry on my back. The chickadees, those flying golf balls with their punk rock eyes and ebony mohawks, bossy and brazen, take my ears, letting me know just how they see this whole thing going, while the shy nuthatch hides, its cinnamon shadow disappearing under my shirt as it hops up my ribs and nuzzles in like a newborn near my heart. A pair of doves, and then another, their wings ash gray and spotted with apricot, nestle in on the soft give of my belly; I touch them with just the tips of my fingers, hoping, praying, they’ll teach me the tender songs only possible in the dark. One by one, they all settle in, on my limbs, my skin, feathering, resting, and maybe, so will I, settle for real, for the first time in years, as I hear and feel their heartbeats steady, slow, ease finally, into a companion rhythm with my own. Or mine to theirs? In my dreams, it doesn’t matter. In my dreams,we are the same.
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This poem is included in my collection The Night I Heard Everything from FutureCycle Press.
Daily Prompt <3 What You Would Have Said
17 June 2016
“They don’t teach you what to say to someone who’s dying.”~Neil Gaiman
Make art about what you wish you had said before they died.
Sometimes the Prompt is Your Own Pain, and Growth
14 June 2016
Five years ago today, my beautiful funny sexy irreverent brilliant soulful husband, John Little Bear Eaton, walked on to the next life.
“what remains with me vividly to this day is my recollection of a circle of light that shone out from Rafe and enfolded us both, and the deep sense of comfort and familiarity between us, as if we had somehow always known each other and were merely resuming a conversation that had gone on from eternity.”
― Cynthia Bourgeault, Love is Stronger than Death: The Mystical Union of Two Souls
Make art about the eternal nature of Love.
Daily Prompt Catch-Up <3 Family, and Heartbreak, and Fragility
Daily Prompt Catch-Up
6/11/2016
Beautiful day with family today.
From “On Family Regathering Seen One Night Through a Window” by George Moor
All flows; the person has no permanence.
The children will grow up, the parents die.
For each precarious present the past tense
Is waiting; all is sort of a lie.
The clean cut fruit in dingy crystal bowls;
The fading chairs; the family sitting down.
For reassurance meet these traveling souls,
Each with an intimate sadness of his own.
Old habits calm. Old stories of old days….
Make art about family.
6/12/2016
Just don’t have words. Heartbroken.
6/13/2016
My son and I found this tiny nest yesterday, tumbled on the grass beneath the Guardian Oak. No babies, wounded or otherwise, in sight, just this miracle of weaving, bits of bark and straw and leaf and string. Inside the tiniest shards of shell left behind, thin and white as paper. I was struck at how delicate—and how strong—it is, kinda like Love.
Make art about the fragility, about the persistent strength, of Love.
Hundreds of Prompts! Right Here! :-)
Finally got around to getting this website updated 🙂
Including all those Daily Prompts! Right here!
Check em out and get your creativity flowing!
Mary Carroll-Hackett Daily Prompts!
Something a Lil Different: Teaching My Sons About Rape
I can’t even read anymore about the Stanford rapist. As the mother of sons, and as a survivor, I literally felt nauseated at the father’s statement. My oldest son was nine years old when he quietly asked me, “Mom, what does ‘rape’ mean?” I was washing dishes, my back to him (as I learned, raising boys, was often the case when they wanted to ask questions that made them uncomfortable and didn’t want their over-explaining Mama to sit them down for a long-winded talk). The quiet fear in his voice as he asked still rings in my ears, even now nearly twenty years later.
He was afraid to know. But he needed to know. He knew he needed to know.
I knew it had taken him a while to come ask me, so I honored that, didn’t turn to face him, kept my hands moving slowly and methodically in the hot soapy water, asking him where he’d heard the word. “At school,” he said, his voice low. “A sixth grade girl at another school was raped, they said.”
My gut clenched, my throat ached, for the girl, for all the girls, and for my beautiful innocent boy, with his straight-as-a-stick toss of blond hair, his guileless eyes so much like my own mama’s, in their deep blue, in the way they looked on the world–all of it–with wonder and delight. My heart ached, because I knew I was getting ready to take away some of that innocence and awe, that I had to answer his question, and had to begin to expand what I’d already worked to teach him of respect for all others into an area of understanding that would reveal darkness and violence and pain and trauma as parts of the world, of this life, he loved so much.
I didn’t want to do it. I didn’t want to tell him.
I wanted him to know only Light and Love and Compassion. I didn’t want to be the one who revealed this darkness to my beautiful beautiful boy.
But I did. I explained it. I explained what rape was.
I explained the physical act of violence. I explained the emotional and psychological and soul scars it leaves. I explained that it was not about sex at its core (We’d already begun to talk too about the miracle and sanctity of sex as a way of expressing deep Love), but about power and violence and deliberate harm.
I explained the best I could to my child, my son, not even in middle school yet, about the respect he must show to everyone, especially to women, and elders, and children younger than himself. I explained that his sacred duty as a man, as a human being, was to protect those unable to protect themselves, and that, later, when he was a teen, a young man, a man, that that included young women who might make the bad choice of drinking too much, or find themselves vulnerable for other reasons, that then, even more, he had a sacred duty to protect, never ever to take advantage or to harm.
I spelled it out as I dried dishes, glancing back now and then to where he sat at the table behind me, the same table where he’d goofed and been, you know, nine, while we ate dinner. He nodded solemnly when I asked, “Does that answer what you wanted to know?”
He stood and slid the chair back in under the table, and said, “I’m gonna finish my homework now.”
“Okay,” I said, watching as he slipped quietly from the room. I folded the kitchen towel and hung it back into place, so small and normal a gesture in that moment that it felt surreal. I took my glass of iced tea from where it sat sweating on the table, walked out to the front porch, where my kids couldn’t hear me, and I cried, cried until I couldn’t cry anymore.
That night broke the mother’s heart in me. But I did it. Because as a parent, it was my duty, my sacred responsibility, as the mother of sons.
Years later, I would find out from my students that my sons, both of them, were, in fact, men who took that role of protector seriously, that they had both been known to step in and take care of young women who had imbibed too much, who found themselves in vulnerable positions. My sons themselves never told me. I heard it from grateful young women who told me and thanked me after. I asked my youngest son, that Manchild, once about it, and he shrugged it off, simply saying, “It’s what we’re supposed to do. Take care of people, right?”
Yes. Yes, it is.
silhouette of a mother and son who play outdoors at sunset background
Mary Carroll-Hackett: Poetry and Prose 
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