My longtime poetry collaborator Don Perkins is part of a group doing a poetry challenge this winter. I’m chuffed to bits that he chose to riff off a poem of mine for this piece. Don was also kind enough to record a reading of ‘Integration’ for us to enjoy, here:

And here’s the text, showing the how a ‘glosa’ works.

Integration

In simple ceremonials to bind us into light
we build our bed inside this night and rest
with love as our defence.

“Start Making Sense” Anna Marie Sewell (from For the Changing Moon: Poems and Songs, 2018)

In times like these, of public mis- and dis-
information packaged as essential truths,
meditate on the fact of passages, transitions,
as regular connections between states,
remain aware that we have means to free our sight
in simple ceremonials to bind us into light

and dark, not as separate, too-easy metaphors
for separation of love from hate or truth from lie,
but as contiguous, regular, shared and equal
parts of a patterned route to private knowledge, accept
that night is part of day, the part in which we seek to nest;
we build our bed within this night and rest,

make a place for hectic thoughts to congregate in dreams—
some already gentled in the mind, some the gifts of helpful demons
who ride heavy on the chest, force out in struggling gasps
evil and waste, expose them for contemplation, for
re-organization as life’s fuller fact: learn to absorb this hateful sense
with love as our defence.