Consider the Opening: A Poem for 2024
In November 2022, Kathleen Donahoe published an untitled poem on Instagram that regularly pops up in my mind to serve as - depending on the circumstance - a reminder, an admonition, or a promise. The two lines in the middle of the poem, in particular, have captured me:
Then you, and by you I mean me,
Might consider the opening
Why? Because my greatest flaw boils down to impatience. Just scroll down to the “Who Am I?” section on my About page to see how that appear in all of the personality tests I’ve taken both for work and out of personal curiosity. At least I’m consistent, I guess! My therapists from the last two decades would agree; as one once pointed out to me, “You can be angry or you can adjust your expectations. It’s up to you.”
So, if I were to choose a word of the year for 2024, it would be similar to others I’ve selected over the past decade. No matter what’s going on in my life, I’ve needed to work on patience. On giving grace. On assuming good intentions. On offering the benefit of the doubt.
(For what it’s worth, I’ve made a lot more progress on this in my professional life than I have personally. I suspect it’s because home and the people who love me are safe space so I feel like I can fall apart a bit more there and with them. You know, like how kids behave well at school and then just totally melt down after you pick them up at the end of the day.)
Ever since I read that poem, though, I’ve tried to reframe those efforts. Here’s what I said in a reel I made about Kathleen’s poem in December 2022 and why I’d choose the text “consider the opening” if I were to ever get a tattoo:
“‘Consider the opening’ references the opportunity in every interaction I have… I get to choose how I respond. Whether it’s with kindness and patience and love - or not, because I don’t always have the wherewithal - but I have the power to choose. To consider the opening.”
I won’t get it right all the time. I just won’t. None of us do. And, rather than beating myself up over it, I can take every opening as a new opportunity, full of possibility and hope. I won’t be sent back to zero when I’m not able to, but the successes will build on themselves and it will get easier and easier to respond to people and situations productively.
So, rather than choosing a word for 2024, I decided to write a poem in tribute to Kathleen’s that will guide me for the year ahead.
I’m not good at free verse; give me structure any day! The best poem I’ve ever written - and please note that I haven’t written a poem, even once, since high school when they were assigned - was a sestina, a complex French verse form consisting of six stanzas of six lines each and a three-line envoi, where the end words of the first stanza are repeated in a different order as end words in each of the subsequent five stanzas and the closing envoi contains all six words, two per line, placed in the middle and at the end of the three lines. (Raise your hand if you’re surprised that I would gravitate to this sort of thing even as a teenager. Ha.) I don’t have the time or focus these days to write a sestina but I can manage a tritina:
The American poet Marie Ponsot invented the tritina, which she describes as the square root of the sestina. Instead of six repeated words, you choose three, which appear at the end of each line in the following sequence: 123, 312, 231; there is a final line, which acts as the envoi, which features all three words in the order they appeared in the first stanza. So the poem is structured as three tercets and one single line in conclusion. There is often a turn between the ninth and tenth lines, which gives the tritina similar properties to the sonnet. Ponsot says that poetic forms like the tritina are ‘instruments of discovery. The forms create an almost bodily pleasure in the poet. What you’re doing is trying to discover. They are not restrictive. They pull things out of you. They help you remember’.
- poetryschool.com
With that preamble, then, here we go.
Consider the opening: a poem for 2024
We’re asked to consider
How simply opening
Our hearts to possibility
Might actually invite possibility
In to our lives. If we consider
How much we can fit through that opening
Would it scare us? Or would opening
For these new, perhaps unexpected flashes of possibility
Encourage bravery, so that we could begin to consider
Ourselves fearless when we consider the opening brought by every possibility.
