Below are various poems and stories Writing for Wellness facilitators have used in the sessions. Generally, everybody reads the work silently, and the one person will read it aloud. After everybody has read/listened to the poem or story, they will start discussing it. This does not need to be a serious analysis such as breaking down the beats in a poem, but rather it can be simple, such as what particular lines are people’s favorite, or what does a specific line evoke for them emotionally. From there, the facilitator can guide the discussion into a writing prompt. These writing prompts can vary greatly such as focusing on one line and having each individual in the group write about what it means to them, or having each person write something that mimics the original poem or story.
Poems
“If I Can Stop One Heart from Breaking” by Emily Dickinson
“Look for Me” by Ted Kooser
“Found Object” by Lucia Perillo
“Heaven for Helen” by Mark Doty
“Heaven for Stanley” by Mark Doty
“Nails” by Kait Rokowski
“Where You Go When She Sleeps” by T.R. Hummer
“Handbag” by Ruth Fainlight
“The Weary Blues” by Langston Hughes
“Smoke in Our Hair” by Ofelia Zepeda
“My Sister, Who Died Young, Takes Up the Task” by Jon Pineda
“The Weight of Sweetness” by Li-Young Lee
“Ode to the Onion” by Pablo Neruda
“Man Eating” by Jane Kenyon
“Eating the Cookies” by Jane Kenyon
“Litany” by Billy Collins
“A Poem for S.” by Jessica Greenbaum
“Elegy for My Husband” by Toi Derricotte
“In The Morning, Before Anything Bad Happens” by Molly Brodak
“The Sandhill Cranes of Nebraska” by Billy Collins
“It’s A Lot” by Jon Sands
“The Summer Day” by Mary Oliver
“Dead Stars” by Ada Limon
“Introductions” by Susan Glassmeyer
“Kindness” by Naomi Shihab Nye
“The Peace of Wild Things” by Wendell Berry
“Wild Geese” by Mary Oliver
Creative Nonfiction
Orange Who? by Gwendolyn Nelson
My father was a short man who didn’t know it. On hurricane energy he flirted and joked women out of cars, money, and filet mignon. He knew how to decorate a promise indiscriminately—for waitresses, salesclerks, dental hygienists, and Seventh Day Adventists—with a social director’s forcible cheer. Never a drinker, his only vices were women and an excessive use of pepper. He finished showers with an unshaken faith in closed pores and praised the benefits of sprinting.
He should have been a dancer. Instead, he shuffled and bounced in a boxing ring to no music, scrambling leap-frog brains in exchange for a bantamweight title. At eighty-five, he rejected a walker when his legs betrayed him. Not for him, not after ice skating an 18-barrel jump at Lake George, not after the cover of Ring magazine, and surely not after bulleting the length of Duquesne Gardens in professional hockey, a spray of ice following long blades, his speed-bent torso parallel to the ice. He played sports when all you had to do was love games and moving, be good, and believe you were great. He played when it was enough to give your heart-pumping all, before lessons had to start as early as toilet training with parents in hock for expenses, before sports were hard business.
In between, he worked in steel mills, and after the high times sold Hoover vacuums and Knapp shoes. Once he sold enough vacuums to win a choice of luggage or an oil paint set. The rows of neat paint tubes were cited often as proof of father’s priorities. In the car, he told knock-knock jokes when he wasn’t cursing flawed drivers, his red head straining out a window in Scotch-Irish fury. I remember waiting in the car drinking milk from a quart carton while he demonstrated a vacuum’s suction power: the car rolled backward, stopped at a tree, and he came running, arms out as if he were on fire.
Once my father ejected a woman from her own car and drove off. I could see her grow small in the distance, screaming in the street and jabbing the air with an umbrella. Eventually he did some hard time for trouble with women, and he was perplexed and hurt, as if there had been some misunderstanding. In an untypical search for reason, he attributed the sorry business to boxing: “It must have messed up my head—worse than I thought.”
Youngest of five brothers, he was, by the time I knew him, trying to grab hold again of glory days, the big break always just about to find him. Two brothers were rich; a third preferred the woods, and the fourth hung out in Atlantic City’s beach life. We always visited the rich brothers at dinner time. One of these, a chemical magnate, went to Monaco for Princess Grace’s wedding. My father felt directly connected and satisfied by his brother’s invitation, and this social triumph was cited as frequently as closed pores and the paint set.
As the grand success eluded him, he relied more on dreams. To a feasible plan, he would say, “Let’s not and say we did,” with his own robust version of reality. He never gave up the conviction that my mother, too, would come looking for him.
They met on vacation in Rehobeth Beach, where he was playing knock-knock jokes in high spirits, going door-to-door. Tall and realistic, she opened hers. Before long the Women’s Army Corps and World War II looked safer, so she joined up, shipped out, and counted on change. Over the years, she acquired in his mind a mythic beauty and the attraction of a lost paradise. Some men cry quietly; my father was given to commotion and waving fists, but not for this loss that made others lighter by comparison and marked a downturn for everything afterward. In him, Gatsby met Willy Loman, a doubled formula for the dream doomed.
Crushed by an air compressor at sixty-five, he was hospitalized with tubes in his nostrils, arms, and abdomen—too many to count at a glance. Strange to see him holding still. The nurse said, “This man can’t be sixty-five.” I think rearranging and losing facts spared him some of their stress and natural toll. At eighty-five, without the walker, he refused to sell his piece of land, the top of Brown’s Mountain, though developers snaked up there touching their wallets, fingering surveys. He stood his ground, a goalie in front of a hybrid house. He shouted over promises of paved road and regularly rang up the governor with a confused and obscure agenda. But he hung onto the mountain top, a salesman with goods too right to sell.
Once in a while he called to warn me that the government was not leveling with us about Alaska’s coldest temperature. Once in a great while he wanted to know, “What went wrong?” and the receiver felt heavy.
Knock-knock.
Who’s there?
Orange.
Orange who?
Orange you glad I’m here?
The Signature of God by Judson Mitcham
I was feeding my mother her breakfast at Emory Hospital, where we had taken her again for more tests, when she picked up a small piece of plastic torn from the utensil wrapping. She waved away the spoon when I brought it toward her and, holding up the piece of clear trash, she said, “Isn’t this a cute thing?” then continued to look at it for a long time. She pointed at the toe of my boot and said, “Whose head is that? Is it a baby’s?” She looked at the sunlight coming along the wall and asked me why they had done that, why they hadn’t left it the way it was. After the meal, she appeared to doze, then opened her eyes and said, “What am I supposed to know? Do I know anything? Do I have a name?”
*
And that evening when I drove toward home and stopped for gas at the intersection of two country roads, there were thousands of starlings in the bare oaks lining the road. I paid for the gas and started to drive off, but just then the birds burst from the trees all at once and curved through the sky, throwing darkness over me as they crossed in front of the sun already half hidden by the horizon. I pulled the car away from the gas pumps, cut the engine, rolled down the windows, and sat watching as the giant flock curled and dived and swept across the sky gone hazy blue and deepening. I saw them curving back toward the oaks—a river of birds, a grand black current winding through the heavens. They alighted in the branches squawking and calling, the sound growing louder and louder as they came, thousands of them, burdening the trees, until a roar of squawks, each piercing, filled the dusk.
Another car stopped next to mine, and a young couple got out and leaned against the side of their car, laughing and pointing and shouting to each other.
Then, for no reason I could discern, the birds stopped and lifted off, with the sound of a single wingbeat—silence and then a rush of air with a dampened pop, as though an enormous thick quilt snapped once in the wind.
The young man walked over to me as the birds flew high above the pasture, weaving and turning. “It’s like God writing on the sky,” he said, “it’s like the signature of God.”
And I heard myself answer him in a changed voice, though not a new one. “It’s something,” I said, and I started my car, and I waved to them as I drove away from there, a child heavy with hurt, wanting his mother.
“Shunned” by Meredith Hall
“Corn Maze” by Pam Houston
“The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action” by Audre Lorde
Fiction
“My Superpower” by Leslie A. Dow
“One Hundred Percent Cotton” by David James Poissant
Excerpt from Perfume: The Story of a Murderer by Patrick Süskind
“The sea smelled like a sail whose billows had caught up water, salt, and a cold sun. It had a simple smell, the sea, but at the same time it smelled immense an unique, so much so that Grenouille hesitated to dissect the odors into fishy, salty, watery, seaweedy, fresh-airy, and so on. He preferred to leave the smell of the sea blended together, preserving it as a unit in his memory, relishing it whole. The smell of the sea pleased him so much that he wanted one day to take it in, pure and unadulterated, in such quantities the he could get drunk on it. And late,when he learned from stories how large the sea is and that you can sail upon it in ships for days on end without ever seeing land, nothing pleased him more than the image of himself sitting high up in the crow’s nest of the foremost mast on such a ship, gliding on through the endless smell of the sea–which really was no smell, but a breath, an exhalation of breath, the end of all smells–dissolving with pleasure in that breath. But it was never to be, for Grenouille, who stood there on the river bank at the place de Grève steadily breathing in and out the scraps of sea breeze that he could catch in his nose, would never in his life see the sea, the real sea. The immense ocean that lay to the west, and would never be able to mingle himself with its smell.
He had soon so thoroughly smelled out the quarter between Saint-Eustache and the Hôtel de Ville that he could find his way around in it by pitch-dark night. And so he expanded his hunting grounds, first westward to the Faubourg Saint-Honoré, the out along the rue Saint-Antoine to the Bastille, and finally across to the other bank of the river into the quarters of the Sorbonne and the Faubourg Saint-Germain where the rich people lived. Through the wrought-iron gates at their portals came the smells of coach leather and of the powder in the pages’ wigs, and over the high walls passed the garden odors of broom and roses and freshly trimmed hedges. It was here as well that Grenouille first smelled perfume in the literal sense of the word: a simple lavender or rosewater, with which the fountains of the gardens were filled on gala occasions; but also more complex, more costly scents, of tincture of musk mixed with oils of neroli and tuberose, jonquil, jasmine, or cinnamon, that floated behind the carriages like rich ribbons on the evening breeze.”
Excerpt from Snow Hunters by Paul Yoon
“He was riding a bicycle. He felt a hand on the small of his back. Someone familiar spoke to him and he said,—I can go a little longer, and he lifted a shovel and sank it into the earth. A group of children whistled and clapped. And then he was running his hands through a girl’s hair and she took his wrist and they moved through a corridor where rows of dresses hung from the ceiling. Those dresses turned into the sea.”