***Announcement***
Please join us at dVerse LIVE on Saturday, January 18, from 10 to 11 AM EST. Google meet link will be provided at Open Link Night on Thursday.

For last year’s words belong to last year’s language
And next year’s words await another voice.

T.S. Eliot, Four Quartets

Welcome, dVersians, new ‘uns and old ‘uns! I’m Dora from Dreams from a Pilgrimage, and it’s so good to be back at the start of 2025 to say how good it is to see you all!

I don’t know about you but the beginning of a new year invariably puts me in a philosophical mood. And I think I’ve figured out why. It’s not just turning the page on an old calendar year. It’s the act of turning the page itself, ushering out the old as if were finished in some sense while settling into the new as If it were a blank slate, fresh, untainted. (But is the old really gone or is the new really different?) The month of January is a margin delineating transition, an interstitial calendrical space creating the same effect as physical and emotional spaces or times in our lives. Its very indeterminacy invites contemplation, even examination as to its significance (if any), truth (if any), reverence, even fear of what revelation it may harbor like a soothsayer as we pass through it.

The poem below, for example, describes how the margins delineating the past and the present are never really crossed but reappear in the familiar.

Your challenge: I’ve compiled a list of margins for you to use as inspiration for a poem on a theme of your choosing using a margin of any kind, a diving off point, event, place, landscape, or concept. Use the list (including the images) as a starting point for brainstorming an idea. (Click on the images for more detail.)

The margin of a stream or the seashore
The margins of sensation, of knowing and feeling

Being cold is not the same as feeling cold,
just as Seneca, who wrote on anger,
said it’s different to know a thing
than to feel its truth.

From “Orion,” by Karen Solie (London Review of Books, 26 December 2024, p. 14)

The margin of shade and light, as coming out from under a willow tree, or like twilight and dawn, morning and evening
The margins of time, like the eve of a new year, the past and the present, the present and the future

Mother died today. Or maybe, yesterday; I can’t be sure.

Albert Camus, from The Stranger, first lines

Margin between what you are and what you are becoming, what you were and what you are
Being on the margin of an end and a beginning

Margins of definition, denotation and connotation, interpretation
Margins of creation, conceiving and crafting

Margins of society
The experience of being marginalized

. . . to survive, to hang on,
waiting for the new world to dawn,
what can you do but become a leper
nobody in the world would deign to touch?

From “Windy Evening,” by Kim Seong-dong

Writing from the margins
Margins that act as boundaries, restricting or organizing

Held between wars
my lifetime
                  among wars, the big hands of the world of death
my lifetime
listens to yours.

Muriel Rukeyser, excerpt from “Käthe Kollwitz”

Margin of being on the verge of acting or doing or writing or composing or speaking
Margins of either inviting or dissuading, entering or retreating

Standing on the margins as a wallflower, an intruder, a stranger
Hiding in the margins
Margins of love and hatred, of war and peace, of heaven and hell

Be not forgetful to entertain strangers: for thereby some have entertained angels unawares.

St. Paul in the Letter to the Hebrews (KJV)

Do bells signal a margin to you as they do for me?

Here are some poetic examples for you to look at for inspiration.

I dreamt of walking out of a landscape
as if out of a painting –
tipped from its picture by its tilting fields.

from “Outside the Work” by Lavinia Greenlaw in LRB, (24/12/2024, vol. 46, number 24)

A poem by Walt Whitman:

A poem by Sylvia Plath:

“Morning Poem” by Mary Oliver:

See also Oliver’s “Winter’s Margin.”

An excerpt from T.S. Eliot’s “Four Quartets 4: Little Gidding, V”:

And finally, the last stanza of Yeats’ “Among School Children”:

As I said, the theme of the poem is up to you. All I ask is that you use a type of margin as the springboard for your thought or in passing.

New to dVerse? Here’s how to join in:
* Write a poem in response to the challenge.
* Post your poem on your blog and link back to this post.
* Enter your name and the link to your post by clicking Mr. Linky below (remember to check the little box to accept the use/privacy policy).
* Read and comment on your fellow poets’ work –- there’s so much to derive from reading each other’s writing: new inspiration, new ideas, new friends.