Counting What Remains

a writing prompt for you from Jane Hirshfield + February Writing Hour

Feb 12, 2025

Welcome to Writing in Company. This is a community for you, whatever your experience with writing. It’s an invitation to write about what matters—grief, gratitude, grace, and more. When the world seems off kilter, as it does right now, using our words can help us stay centered. It can help us move through despair toward healing and wholeness as we remember, lament, wonder, and make meaning. Writing in company with others saved me once before. Let’s keep writing now, alone and together, and trust our words to help us say what matters.

With that hope, each week I share some of my words and a writing prompt, meant to be jumping-off points. Use the prompts however you like—to journal, to draft thoughts for your own writing project, as meditation or prayer ideas, or for another creative endeavor. You can always look back through the archive for more ideas. Grab your pen and paper, and let your words loose on the page.

I’m low on words this week. Too underwater from three weeks of travel. Too tired from caregiving. Too worried about the news and implications for family, friends, democracy, the world. So here’s a poem I used in a recent workshop that manages to capture both the weariness and worry, as well as the stubborn hope and resistance that characterizes these days. It’s a New Year’s poem, but since every day lately seems like a whole year, I’m claiming it as a fitting choice.

Counting, This New Year’s Morning, What Powers Yet Remain To Me

—a poem by Jane Hirshfield

The world asks, as it asks daily:
And what can you make, can you do, to change my deep-broken, fractured?
I count, this first day of another year, what remains.
I have a mountain, a kitchen, two hands.
Can admire with two eyes the mountain,
actual, recalcitrant, shuffling its pebbles, sheltering foxes and beetles.
Can make black-eyed peas and collards.
Can make, from last year’s late-ripening persimmons, a pudding.
Can climb a stepladder, change the bulb in a track light.
For four years, I woke each day first to the mountain,
then to the question.
The feet of the new sufferings followed the feet of the old,
and still they surprised.
I brought salt, brought oil, to the question. Brought sweet tea,
brought postcards and stamps. For four years, each day, something.
Stone did not become apple. War did not become peace.
Yet joy still stays joy. Sequins stay sequins. Words still bespangle, bewilder.
Today, I woke without answer.
The day answers, unpockets a thought from a friend
don’t despair of this falling world, not yet
didn’t it give you the asking

a writing prompt

Find a word, a line, an image, or an idea in the poem that jumps out at you, and start there. Keep writing.

I’m beginning with: “Yet joy still stays joy. Sequins stay sequins. Words still bespangle, bewilder.”

Or literally count what remains for you in a bewildering time: One old dog snoring. Two potatoes that someone bought and shared. Four boxes of Girl Scout cookies you ordered from an adorable five year old. Keep going….

February Writing Hour - Sat. Feb 22 | 4-5 pm Eastern

My next live writing hour on Zoom for paid subscribers is in two Saturdays. If you want to write in company with others, you are welcome to join in. You can upgrade your subscription for a month ($7) just to try it. A separate email to paid subscribers will go out with the link, or you can find it on my Substack tab called Writing Hours. Let’s write together.

like/comment/share

Join in the conversation with others in the comments. Tell me what you think about the prompt, or where your writing takes you.

Writing in Company