Sunday, March 14, 2010

Community Poem: April

There is an ancient form of divination called bibliomancy, or telling the future by books. Meaning a passage is picked randomly out of a book, and said to hold the future for the person who randomly picked the sentence. I know after my daughter died, I wanted some insight into the future, just to know if the acute pain of my grief was going to be there forever. So, I thought we might turn this on its head a bit for April's Community Poem.

Here are the rules:
  1. Pick a book that has been important to you in your grief journey. It could be a self-help book, the Bible or other religious text, a grief manual, or some silly mindless book that got you through some tough times.
  2. Balance the book on its spine and allow it to fall open randomly.
  3. With eyes closed, pick a sentence.

Eh, voila. Then, of course, send the sentence to me via stilllife365days(at)gmail(dot)com. Use April Community Poem in the subject line. I am not interested in the page number, or the attribution in that way, but let me know the name of the book. I am not going to write it after your line, but I think it would be cool to see the list of books we all used as inspiration. I'm not sure what will end up in my inbox, or how the community poem will pan out with all these sentences, but I am interested to find out.

Please direct any questions in the comment section of this post, so that I can answer them there for everyone to read. Thank you.

1 comment:

  1. It's a silly stumbling point, as I want so much to have some creative processing of my grief, but I cannot get a book to work like that. Really, the few books I've read in this past 8 weeks fall over to one side or, (in the case of a huge anthology I've read) stand up on end all by themselves.

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