Poetry Friday: "I Stop Somewhere Waiting For You" (A Walt Whitman/Susan Thomsen/Chicken Spaghetti-inspired poem)

A few weeks ago, Susan Thomsen, at Chicken Spaghetti, posted a prompt: begin a poem with the last line (I stop somewhere waiting for you) of Walt Whitman's "Song of Myself." 

Susan's take on the prompt is here, and her "Flurries of Winter" is an enchanting take, full of joy and verve and love and snow. 

I went a different route, being the INFJ/Melancholic Eeyore that I am. 😏

I might've composed my response sooner if I hadn't tripped myself up by turning the prompt upside down. I'd gotten it fixed in my head that I should end the poem with the suggested line. I tried a number of different openings and approaches but none of them were working. Page after page of garbage. I decided to go reread Susan's post/prompt, thinking maybe I'd pick up some new inspiration. 

"Oh!" I said to my upside-downed self. "I'm going to START the poem with that line." Well. Okay then. Let's try that. 

I imagined being caught in a wretched kind of limbo with a friend or significant other or spouse — really anyone you're trying to have an authentic relationship with when you aren't getting anything in return. (I mean, truly ... we've all been there.) And then the poem wrote itself in twenty minutes.

The lesson here is to listen to Susan more closely the first time. But I think, in general, it's just good advice to listen to Susan. 

Okay, here we go: 

"I Stop Somewhere Waiting For You" 

         ~ Walt Whitman, "Song of Myself" 

I stop somewhere waiting for you. 

Somewhere.
Waiting.
For you.

It’s exhausting, being mired 

in this bog, slogging through
a swamp of unearned, unreturned 

hope and promise. 

I don’t really even know where I am.

“Somewhere”?
Who chooses to live there?

It feels like Wonderland,
and every bit as absurd.
You make me believe
six impossible things before breakfast
but by dinner time, I’m famished.

So I've decided.
I’m moving to a new anywhere.
I will learn its borders and boundaries as I go.
The plan is still fuzzy.

 
But I stop, somehow, waiting for you.

~~~~~~~~~~

Susan has the entire Poetry Friday round-up this week.

Visit her at Chicken Spaghetti and enjoy lots of poetic goodness. 

Poetry Friday: “God” by Brian Doyle

Brian Doyle was a luminous writer who died from a brain tumor in 2017 at the age of 60, an inexplicable injustice in this world if ever there was one. 

According to this obituary in The Beacon, after he received his diagnosis, he said, “I’ll hear all laughter. Be tender to each other. Be more tender than you were yesterday, that’s what I would like. You want to help me? Be tender and laugh.”

I delight in every ounce of his work (novels, essays, poems, and prose poems he called proems) and I’m on a mission to be a Brian Doyle completist. I corresponded with him only once, when I was seeking permission from Portland magazine (which he edited for many years) to reprint a story excerpt in one of my books. His emails were as charming as everything else of his I’ve ever read. 

This week, because the magic of children has been on my mind, because children are pure and holy and dinosaur-loving vessels who deserve to be protected and flooded with love, I’m sharing this one, which I'd never read before today and just now seredipitously stumbled upon. I’d like to think Brian had something to do with that. 

God is in the Kindergartener, is the Kindergartener. What a luminous and spot-on thought. 

God
by Brian Doyle 

By purest chance I was out in our street when the kindergarten
Bus mumbled past going slow and I looked up just as all seven
Kids on my side of the bus looked at me and I grinned and they
Lit up and all this crap about God being dead and where is God
And who owns God and who hears God better than whom is the
Most egregiously stupid crap imaginable because if you want to
See God and have God see you and have this mutual perception
Be completely untrammeled by blather and greed and comment,
Go stand in the street as the kindergarten bus murmurs past. I’m

Not kidding and this is not a metaphor. I am completely serious.

….

(Read the rest here.) 

~~~~~~~~~~

The Poetry Friday round-up this week is being hosted by Robyn at Life on the Deckle Edge. 

Photo courtesy of Pixabay. 

Poetry Friday: "Dear Reader" by Billy Collins

It is far, far, far past time for some Billy Collins. I need him, don't you? 

And this one targets my readerly heart as if its poetic arrow is aimed to pierce me, only me. Because, well, it is. That's how poetry works. That's how Billy Collins works. That's how reading works. ❤️

Oh, how I love to read. Some of the books and writers who have been my sisters, brothers, kindred spirits, or heralds of surprise and fascination thus far in 2026 include: 

Memorial Days, Geraldine Brooks 

The Vaster Wilds, Lauren Groff

The Separation of Church and Hate, John Fugelsang

The Berry Pickers, Amanda Peters 

The Road to Tender Hearts, Annie Hartnett

Flashlight, Susan Choi

Homeschooled, Stefan Merrill Block  

As Collins says in the final line of this poem, books and I are on "a road we will always be traveling together." 

Who are you traveling with right now? What have you read in the last month? 

Dear Reader 

by Billy Collins 

Baudelaire considers you his brother,
and Fielding calls out to you every few paragraphs
as if to make sure you have not closed the book,
and now I am summoning you up again,
attentive ghost, dark silent figure standing
in the doorway of these words.

Pope welcomes you into the glow of his study,
takes down a leather-bound Ovid to show you.
Tennyson lifts the latch to a moated garden,
and with Yeats you lean against a broken pear tree,
the day hooded by low clouds.

But now you are here with me,
composed in the open field of this page,

....

(Read the rest here, at The Poetry Foundation.) 

~~~~~~~~~~

Molly at Nix the Comfort Zone is hosting the Poetry Friday round-up today. 

Photo courtesy of Pexels.