I’m looking forward to catching up with my Cambridge writers later today. Here are some prompts so that you can join us, wherever you are:

What is this day with two suns in the sky?

Day unlike other days,

With a great voice giving it to the planet,

Here it is, enamoured beings, your day!  

(Quatrain, Rumi, 1207-1273)

You, Beloved, who are all

the gardens I have ever gazed at,

longing. An open window

(You who never arrived, Rainer Maria Rilke, 1875-1926)

The highway is full of big cars

going nowhere fast

And folks is smoking anything that’ll burn

Some people wrap their lives around a cocktail glass

And you sit wondering

where you’re going to turn

I got it.

Come. And be my baby.

(Come, and be my baby, Maya Angelou, 1928-2014)

A sad sort of rain,

today, and I inside, alone,

look at the pictures I took of you

in London and Paris and Spain.  

(Rain, Margaret Newlin, 1925-2005)

How many loved your moments of glad grace,

And loved your beauty with love false or true,

But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you,

And loved the sorrows of your changing face

 (When you are old, WB Yeats, 1865-1939)

Agony! Pain hangs in my heart. Is it she?

It cannot be. Walk on. In the blue, a star.

(The street in shadow, Antonio Machado, 1875-1928)

Last night at my daughter’s, near Blaine,

she did her best to tell me

what went wrong

between her mother and me.

‘Energy. You two’s energy was all wrong.’  (Energy, Raymond Carver, 1938-1988)