Writing Through Hard Times – February 2019
Each month, the Denver VOICE publishes a selection of writing from workshops sponsored by Lighthouse Writers Workshop. The Hard Times Writing Workshop is a collaboration between Denver Public Library and Lighthouse Writers Workshop. This workshop is open to all members of the public—especially those experiencing homelessness. Hard Times meets every Tuesday from 3-5 p.m. on the fourth floor of DPL’s Central branch. The Lighthouse sponsored workshop at The Gathering Place is specifically for that organization’s clients.
To check out more writing by the poets featured in this column, go to writedenver.org.
The DPL Hard Times Group
Bits & Pieces | Collected by Giuliana Brunner
Over several years, bits and pieces were collected from numerous attendees sharing their writing in the Hard Times Writing Workshop. Amazing souls who have shared humor, heart, hurts, loves, and spirit openly among those of us honored to be able to participate in this experience. You might find words here that open a piece of you – if not possibly a trigger – a burst of joy, a tear, or a heart cry cracking an opening for a new light to enter – or – sense a connecting thread or recognition in another’s words.
Her hair and Jesus had the same stylist
The one who fights with the invisible
Wizened wrinkled fuzzy face
Tears of the sunset
Incarcerated without indictment
It’s in the stillness of the soft smile of the crescent moon resting on the sky
Eat enough of the good and your temple will be at strife with itself
Struggling to find my laughing place
How does one vacate oneself
Rainbow rivers rolling across the stars
Never in the same room with its company
Getting all my selves on one page
Years had frosted her feathery shoulders
What’s holding it up? My imagination of course
Like a small mole blinking at sunlight
A door pushed in a threshold crossed
Think lost some of my tears not sure they were a useful way of getting from one place to another
He’s talking dirty to us trading cake for the truth
My mission is to crash into the sun
Panorama of stars pathways to mysteries as if the universe could be held down
I fall asleep and say to you what we can’t say when we’re awake
If words could kill they have become victims – and she the survivor
The moon shrinks, wind-whittled, sinks down among the alley shadows
Cling to my relationship like a toddler to adult legs
Scarlet haze surrounded my soul
Monkey mind thoughts
We need to remember that we need to march to the beat of our own drummer and tell it like it is
George Carlin said “people will think you are crazy if they can’t hear the music that you are dancing to”
Cells rejuvenate daily so why not now force me to explore who i really am
As time creeps on so does the snake
Awe in all that is wonder
Belittlement scars lace her wounded mind
Dishing out dim sum, dim sum of her hope
One day with god, a child without a filter
Writing from the heart is always successful
Mike Sindler
Joe
Joe couldn’t stand to be inside
and so he slept out on the street
under a roof, he felt confined
Joe couldn’t stand to be inside
For years, in a cell, he’d done time
his world comprised six by eight feet
Joe couldn’t stand to be inside
and so he slept out on the street
Daniel Angel Martinez
Getting Past Compassion
They came as “huddled masses yearning to breathe free.”
There’s no need to extend a welcome but a wall.
No reason for us to think compassionately.
Now those Europeans who came across the sea,
their hardships were no different, as I recall.
They came as “huddled masses yearning to breathe free.”
Seems like we’ve forgotten our common history
in being stripped of homeland, family and all.
No reason for us to think compassionately.
Why can’t we be in the same good company?
In order for some to rise, do some have to fall?
They came as “huddled masses yearning to breathe free.”
Scales of Justice now tip a different degree.
How did new arrival’s troubles become so small?
No reason for us to think compassionately.
Seems America is consumed with apathy.
On our great wall, these few words I’m tempted to scrawl:
“They came as ‘huddled masses yearning to breathe free’ –
no reason for us to think compassionately.”
