Put your hand in mine

The spring I waited for the dogwood to bloom

Nearby is the country they call life.

You will know it by its seriousness.

Give me your hand.

Ranier Marie Rilke, from “Go to the Limits of Your Longing”

I’ve been mulling over what to write all week. Instead of figuring it out first, I finally just brought my laptop into bed with me this morning and started. Like life, writing is the act of putting one word in front of the next. Unlike life, I can erase these words and rewrite them as many times as I want. Not that life doesn’t contain new beginnings; each day, each hour, each minute offers me the chance to shift slightly or sometimes a lot. I’ve blown my life up a couple times. Made decisions, whether consciously or unconsciously, that changed the trajectory of everything. I’ve left wreckage in my wake that I’ve had to go back and clean up. Each decision brought me to a new place, a place I ultimately needed to be. But I’ve never had to do it alone. There has always been someone who said “give me your hand.”

This week I wrote the acknowledgments for my poetry book that’s due out in April 2025. As an editor, I’ve edited hundreds of acknowledgments. I always read an author’s acknowledgments. (I even read copyright pages because I used to put those together for the books I worked on when I was an in-house editor at a publishing company.) I don’t know if readers other than editors and the author’s friends and family read acknowledgments.

Some authors list everyone they’ve ever known going back to first grade. I could have thanked my senior English teacher because she was the first person who told me I could write outside of my parents who loved everything. I didn’t, though I guess I’m thanking her here, for that encouragement, that nudge. Then there was a professor at the University of North Texas, James Lee, who taught creative writing, and when I went to meet with him, he told me the story I was working on was fantastic! Keep going! So I did.

After I graduated I went to a retreat in East Texas called the Syvenna Foundation that was inspired by Virginia Woolf’s assertion that to write a woman needed a room of her own and an income. I got a cottage in the East Texas woods and a stipend to write for three months. And I finished that novel. Although it was never published, I really do believe I’ve had to write everything I’ve written, walk through all the rejections and acceptances, but mostly rejections, to get where I am today—a poet with my first book coming out next year.

The following poem was inspired by my time in East Texas, in that cottage of my own where I could write and do nothing else for three months. I wrote it in grad school at Mills College. It was probably 1992. It was finally published in 2021 in Jung Journal: Culture & Psyche.

The Spring I Waited for the Dogwood to Bloom


Every day that spring
I watched 
Every morning
I walked out
my white robe trailing 
across the wooden boards
Splinters scratched 
the soles of my feet
My hands wrapped 
around a mug of coffee
steaming in the still cool air

I had come to the woods
to cocoon myself in green brush
and gray thunderclouds
as if in a room of my own
I could become
someone else deliberately

I waited 
for the lime-green blossoms to appear
the petals to unfold
toward the warming sun
The flowers faded to white
painting the forest 
in eyelet lace

When I emerged 
the dogwood blossoms had fallen
green leaves covered
the thin branches
I was only myself
yet softened by mornings 

I stood still enough
patient for once in my life
to see a dogwood tree bloom

So thank you to Mona Sizer, James Lee, and Sylva Billue, who nudged, encouraged, and gave me a place to write.

Who has taken your hand when you needed it?

Please feel free to share.