A Novena of Red Teacups, 4

"About STEEPING ..." and "Miss Rumphius"

Hello, Poetry Friend

When a friend introduced me to a picture book titled Miss Rumphius, by Barbara Cooney, I immediately liked the part where our hero is submerged. The story, set in Maine, is about a girl named Alice who grows up to make the world beautiful by sowing lupines. She was known as The Lupine Lady by her admirers and as That Crazy Old Lady by her detractors.

My favorite illustration happens before she moves into her calling. She is ill, stuck in bed. A book is open on her lap, but she is not reading it. A cat rests on her bed, and she absentmindedly strokes it. Her cane lays next to her bedside table. She wears a nightgown of ivory. The window is open, the breeze blows, and she looks out at four lupines she had planted the year before, in stony ground. Now they are a-bloom.

For many years I was like Miss Rumphius: submerged. Sunk, really. But I didn’t know it.

I was sleep-writing.

To look at me, professionally, you might not have guessed this was true. Employed as a writer and editor, my deadline list was full. Things fell apart, and on I went, hanging on by twin slim threads: work harder, go without. During that period, which began with my mother’s illness and death and ended a decade later with my father’s illness and death, other parts of my life also fell apart.

I journaled, but I left the page more depressed than when I sat down to write. I played with memoir, but my story was too unresolved to provide a satisfying narrative arc. I’m a writer; I process life through my pencil. The front door to cathartic writing was locked. The back door was jammed. I needed an open window.

So I attended a workshop led by romance author Allie Plieter called “How to Write (or Write About) When Everything Goes Wrong.” The Everything that went wrong in her life was her son’s cancer. Someone on staff at the children’s hospital recommended she start a string of beads to mark each milestone. Bead by bead, her string grew to eight feet in length.

How long would mine be? What would my beads be? I decided they would be poems. They just needed a little steeping.

About STEEPING ...

I once saw the words “Tea must steep”
and since, at the time,
I myself was submerged
and not pulled up from the waters
but seeming to need to stay below surface
until some force outside me
decided the fullness of time had arrived,
those 3 words resonated
and I relaxed about the whole thing.
	
– Marilyn Yocum

I met Marilyn in a workshop on tea and poetry I taught for Tweetspeak Poetry. She has had some rough days, but they have not dampened her sweet touch of humor so evident in this poem. It must be one of her strings.

What is yours?

Poetry is my window cracked open that lets me look out on the lupines. It gives me a way to write slant about things that are unwritable. Bead by bead. Poem by poem. Red teacup by red teacup.

Happy poeming!

Megan