Open Letter to my Sangha

Open Letter to My Sangha:
Beginning the New Year as a Community of Writers

H. Ní Aódagaín

Like many folk, I spent the New Year's weekend among friends, raising toasts and stating resolutions. As I listened to the writers in the crowd, a common theme emerged: we each, in our own way, were setting new goals concerning our writing and making a renewed commitment to the writing life. These conversations led me to compare the community of writers I belong to with another community, which exists in the Buddhist tradition, the sangha.

Temple Poem

by Bethroot Gwynn

It is not just that I love one woman

Invite her into the hushed temple of my most sacred self

Travel with her into the far corners

of her most private being.

It is not just that I am coupled;

I have coupled with her, and with her, and with her.

I am tripled, and quadrupled.

I am a throng of worshippers

reverent before our own images

jubilant to invent our own litanies.

Wednesday morn

Blood tears from a still chill sky ooze down
settling round my feet
shriveling in the grim morning sun
aching for a reprieve

the willow
bereft of even a scant scarf for her frozen limbs
holds her head high
and cries

collaboration / transport - ing

In the distance a train. Why do I not feel forlorn by the whistle here in Oregon?  I consider the trainyards of California, urban or not, shudder at memories: loss, loneliness, punctuated by the long moan of freight trains...  did these sounds trouble my childhood?  Possibly later, in those years of uncongenial youth spent with relatives, the sense of loss having stiffened. Deeper aversion to train noises, especially at night, must have arisen later, connected with Santa Barbara by a palimpsest of one loneliness upon another.

Greece. Olga Broumas. Intimations of Sappho in summer 1993, West Hollywood: hearing Olga and T. Begley read collaboratively what they have written collaboratively, sheets of powerful words, loose-leaf orange swirling from one writer’s hands to the stage

Escape into November

I counsel others to make the time
for art and self; this phase of solitude
I too need vigilance
not only to sort, organize, discard,
but to rest;

not just to complete task after task,
but to play;

And Yet the Moon

by helen laurence

following national election, November 14, 2016: ‘supermoon’
(closest since January 26,1948)

We wander half-jangled:
upheaval, avenues of gloom
after hopes of tipping into lamplit ease...shock
insistent on rising like the rows of spikes
in a parking lot, warning “Do Not Back Up,”
but now furtively switched,

Our Traditionally Exceptionally Agreeable Group

[Editor's note:  This is a 50 year old piece written by one of the true matriarchs of Women's Lands and Women's Writings in Oregon.  When Jean read it to Writer's Group recently, we all giggled our way through it.  We hope you enjoy it too.]

by Jean Mountaingrove, Rootworks, Oregon

When the Southern Oregon Women Writers Group, Gourmet Eating Society and Chorus meets, we observe these traditions:

We start promptly at eleven a.m., except when we're expecting someone who is going to be late.