A Poem For My Latest Circle Around the Sun

In 2024

more
native blooms
haiku moments &
dusty hiking boots

more 
snuggles in the trailer
writers round the table &
prayers up to Heaven

more
“look at the sunrise!”
”what are you reading?” &
”yes, I have time.”

more
interruptions,
ease &
love

I wrote this poem in early 2024. I loved it so much that I asked women to write their versions at several retreats. It’s been a personal touchstone for the entire year and I’m thankful that Elise Blaha Cripe inspired me (you can read her original poem HERE).

Some folks go to thrift stores and swap meets looking for treasure. My treasure is found in words arranged on pages. When I find a gem, I hear a voice in my head shouting, “Borrow this structure and write!”

In the writing teacher world, we call this copy change. Writing under the influence of another writer’s structure is a great way to stretch your writing skills. In Steal Like an Artist, Austin Kleon writes, “A wonderful flaw about human beings is that we’re incapable of making perfect copies. Our failure to copy our heroes is where we discover where our own thing lives. That is how we evolve.”

On the surface, the structure of this poem looks simple. It’s just a list of what we’d like more of in our lives. In the early stages of my writing process, I whipped out a bunch of messy first drafts.

I didn’t love any of those first attempts, but they led me to a version I loved (the one that begins this post) and helped me notice the moves Elise made as a writer. With a few tweaks of my own, I followed Elise’s pattern and loved the results:

First stanza: nouns with adjectives
Second stanza: prepositional phrases
Third stanza: quotes
Fourth stanza: one-word lines
No capital letters
No punctuation except for quotation marks and a couple of exclamation marks
Using an ampersand instead of AND
All lines begin with more
All stanzas are four lines
Elise is also an artist—the way this poem looks on the page is visually appealing—she makes use of white space. Plus using & instead of and is an aesthetic game changer.

You can do this too! Just ask yourself the following question:

What do you want more of in your life?

However, before you write, here are some quick tips to help you outrun your feisty internal censor:

Permit yourself to write some terrible lines! You can always cross them out later.
Write fast.
Don’t worry about spelling or punctuation.
Keep your pen moving. If you get stuck, write I’m stuck I’m stuck I’m stuck until you aren’t. Cross it out later.

Finally, this is a great writing invitation to return to regularly. What we want more of can vary from year to year, season to season.

For example, my birthday was yesterday and I wrote this version on the patio! This is a rough draft, but here’s what I wrote: