Cynthia Harrison

Wrote a poem I actually like this morning. Here’s all I had to do. First, I travelled a few hundred miles to another country with two close friends. We have known each other twenty years. Among other things, we watched brilliant actors perform the Chekhov play Three Sisters. Three friends, three sisters. There’s something about the number three that poetry likes. While away, I read Mary Oliver‘s Evidence. Her cadence inspires me, Chekhov and his actors and my friends inspire me, but I still didn’t have a poem.  Then, on the return, we told stories of times we had suffered and healed, like the sisters in Chekhov’s play. “This is the story I will never write,” I told my friends. And then I came back to my own blessed bed, slept well, woke to this cool August morning. As I sipped my tea, a poem rose like steam. It was the story that only yesterday I thought I’d never write.