Begin Again

We are so excited for the re-start of the After Hours Coffeehouse! As we've shared earlier, the theme for the February 15 gathering is 'Begin Again'. To begin again is to return, to take on the shape of what came before, but also to start anew. Something from the past is picked up, reshaped, carried forward. In February the sun lovingly returns, in fits and starts, and begins to coax new life—snowdrops emerge, red camelias flower, new buds sprout from underground, deepening connective roots.

Here are some offerings to pique your interest:

In the Beginning 
by Dylan Thomas

Here is the final stanza of this poem:

In the beginning was the secret brain.
The brain was celled and soldered in the thought
Before the pitch was forking to a sun;
Before the veins were shaking in their sieve,
Blood shot and scattered to the winds of light
The ribbed original of love. 

Each year
By Dora Malech

                  I snap the twig to try to trap
the springing and I relearn the same lesson.
You cannot make a keepsake of this season. 
Your heart’s not the source of that sort of sap,
lacks what it takes to fuel, rejects the graft,
though for a moment it’s your guilty fist 
that’s flowering. You’re no good host to this
extremity that points now, broken, back at
the dirt as if to ask are we there yet.
You flatter this small turn tip of a larger 
book of matches that can’t refuse its end,
re-fuse itself, un-flare. Sure. Now forget
again. Here’s a new green vein, another
clutch to take, give, a handful of seconds.

Copyright © 2010 by Dora Malech. Used with permission of the author.

Song of the Open Road, 1
By Walt Whitman

Afoot and light-hearted I take to the open road,
Healthy, free, the world before me,
The long brown path before me leading wherever I choose. 

Henceforth I ask not good-fortune, I myself am good-fortune,
Henceforth I whimper no more, postpone no more, need nothing,
Done with indoor complaints, libraries, querulous criticisms,
Strong and content I travel the open road.

The earth, that is sufficient,
I do not want the constellations any nearer,
I know they are very well where they are,
I know they suffice for those who belong to them.

(Still here I carry my old delicious burdens,
I carry them, men and women, I carry them with me wherever I go,
I swear it is impossible for me to get rid of them,
I am fill’d with them, and I will fill them in return.)

And finally....

Check out Barbara Jane Reyes’s ‘Again, She Tells the First Story’

See you all soon!
Cynthia and Yvonne