The Poetry Portal

Ellen Liberatori

A resounding, “Thank you” for the poets, writers and readers who engaged mind, heart, and soul for the first Invite to Write through the Poetry Portal. Many of you were inspired by the Untitled Sculpture and theme of Offering in October's newsletter. Your poems arrived in the nick of time, as it was a gray afternoon, and I had been stooped over the computer a bit too long and feeling somewhat empty. As I read poem after poem and heard many different and beautiful voices, the void I felt became filled. I had entered the Portal and heard the family of voices which lifted me. We have printed some herein that we would like to share with you.

In our current Invite to Write, we have chosen, a 1989 Aboriginal painting entitled, Sandover River. Somehow I have found myself on many a river from the Nile to the Susquehanna and it is a fitting image to follow our last theme Offering. The first time I visited the banks of the Susquehanna River, the guide who had brought me there said, “Before you ask her for anything - before you draw from her, please make an offering”.

Through this Portal we have done that collectively and so in this new image we invite you to the river's edge where we have gathered at the beginning of winter and the theme of Renewal. Winter is the special time of half-light and the time of dreams, and the soul's sleep, as Native people have told me. Gazing through this image, I feel the river running through me, through dream time, through prayers of renewal I now whisper:

“…give me beauty in the inward soul; and may the outward and inward man be at one. May I reckon the wise to be wealthy, and may I have such a quantity of gold as a temperate man [that] he only can bear and carry-Anything more? [This] prayer, I think is enough for me.” —Plato’s Phaedrus

Send us your inspired poems by February 15, 2013.