By Linda McCauley Freeman
PROMPT — I am grateful for ...
I am grateful for the pause, the time we have asked for all our adult lives for nowhere to go, nothing pressing to do. I am grateful for the organized closets and all my books, finally shelved alphabetically by author and categorized. And for the time to read them. I am grateful for the decades of poems transferred from scraps of paper, now edited and filed on my computer, ready for submission. I am grateful for the six poems accepted already. Maybe this will be next? I am grateful for returning to cloth napkins and leisurely dinners with wine, with my husband, with no crushing stress for either of us to be anywhere else but here, with each other, fully. I am so grateful for the pause, the hamster wheel running wild forced still and silent, creating the possibilities inherent in just being.
* Photograph by AZY Foley Photography
Linda McCauley Freeman has been widely published in literary journals and anthologies, including a Chinese translation of her work for an international journal. She recently won Grand Prize in Storiarts poetry contest honoring Maya Angelou, and her work was selected by the Arts Mid Hudson for inclusion in their Artists Respond to Poetry 2018 show and Poets Respond to Art 2020 show. She was a three-time winner in the Talespinners Short Story contest judged by Michael Korda. Linda has an MFA in Writing and Literature from Bennington College and is the former poet-in-residence of the Putnam Arts Council. She and her husband are professional swing dance instructors in the Hudson Valley, NY (www.got2lindy.com).