List by List, Line by Line, Love by Love

a writing prompt for you

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. In an off-kilter world, using our words can help us stay centered and move toward healing and wholeness. Writing in company with others saved me once. Let’s keep writing now, alone and together, and trust our words to help us see and say what matters.

I’ve always been a sucker for a list. I have several going right now. On the list of my current lists are these lists:

1. Carry-on luggage to check out (for the impossibly small Qatar airlines restrictions.)

2. Books to read. (I just finished Jeff Chu’s Good Soil, and am reading for the millionth time, Pride and Prejudice for The Great Jane Austen Read-Along)

2. What to watch. (The Residence was fun. Just started Andor season 2, and realize I need to rewatch season 1.)

3. A grocery list. (Because dinner last night scraped the bottom of a barebones fridge and freezer—2 small scoops of leftover risotto, frozen mozzarella sticks with jarred marinara sauce, and a skimpy salad.)

4. To do this week. (I won’t bore you with that list but it includes these verbs: edit, figure out, preload, set, find, finish, email, figure out again.)

In my Writing Hours we often begin with a quick list of the current month: What have been some of the sights, sounds, people, events of the month so far? Then we choose one item from our individual lists and write more about it, taking a random list of things that are top of mind, and writing deeper—toward what matters—to what lies underneath.

Our lists can be simple and practical, and they can set the stage for deeper insight.

In her book Make a List: how a simple practice can change our lives and open our hearts, Marilyn McEntyre writes:

In the process of making a list, I generally find that I can, as a therapist used to advise, “go to the place in me that knows.” Line by line, I can take myself there. It’s a place of deep, lively, sometimes amusing, sometimes daunting encounter with the self, and, often, encounter with the indwelling Spirit who is more present, available, reliable, and forgiving than we may think.

When you make a list, if you stay with it and take it slowly, take it seriously but playfully, give yourself plenty of permission to put down whatever comes up, you begin to clarify your values, your concerns, the direction your life is taking, your relationship to your inner voice, your humor, your secrets. You discover the larger things that lists can reveal.

During April, National Poetry Month, I’ve been sharing poems as writing prompts as a way to help us navigate difficult days. On this last day of April, I chose a poem that has grown around a list, revealing the poet’s values and the wisdom of an inner voice. It’s a long one, but worth it. The poetry database where it is originally posted, Split This Rock, notes the poem is“part of a special January 20, 2017 Poem of the Week collection featuring six poems in conversation with the 2017 Presidential Inauguration”.

You Are Who I Love

—by Aracelis Girmay

You, selling roses out of a silver grocery cart

You, in the park, feeding the pigeons
You cheering for the bees

You with cats in your voice in the morning, feeding cats

You protecting the river You are who I love
delivering babies, nursing the sick

You with henna on your feet and a gold star in your nose

You taking your medicine, reading the magazines

You looking into the faces of young people as they pass, smiling and saying, Alright! which, they know it, means I see you, Family. I love you. Keep on.

You dancing in the kitchen, on the sidewalk, in the subway waiting for the train because Stevie Wonder, Héctor Lavoe, La Lupe

You stirring the pot of beans, you, washing your father’s feet

You are who I love, you
reciting Darwish, then June

Feeding your heart, teaching your parents how to do The Dougie, counting to 10, reading your patients’ charts

You are who I love, changing policies, standing in line for water, stocking the food pantries, making a meal

You are who I love, writing letters, calling the senators, you who, with the seconds of your body (with your time here), arrive on buses, on trains, in cars, by foot to stand in the January streets against the cool and brutal offices, saying: YOUR CRUELTY DOES NOT SPEAK FOR ME

You are who I love, you struggling to see

You struggling to love or find a question

You better than me, you kinder and so blistering with anger, you are who I love, standing in the wind, salvaging the umbrellas, graduating from school, wearing holes in your shoes

You are who I love
weeping or touching the faces of the weeping

You, Violeta Parra, grateful for the alphabet, for sound, singing toward us in the dream

You carrying your brother home
You noticing the butterflies

Sharing your water, sharing your potatoes and greens

You who did and did not survive
You who cleaned the kitchens
You who built the railroad tracks and roads
You who replanted the trees, listening to the work of squirrels and birds, you are who I love
You whose blood was taken, whose hands and lives were taken, with or without your saying
Yes, I mean to give. You are who I love.

You who the borders crossed
You whose fires
You decent with rage, so in love with the earth
You writing poems alongside children

You cactus, water, sparrow, crow You, my elder
You are who I love,
summoning the courage, making the cobbler,

getting the blood drawn, sharing the difficult news, you always planting the marigolds, learning to walk wherever you are, learning to read wherever you are, you baking the bread, you come to me in dreams, you kissing the faces of your dead wherever you are, speaking to your children in your mother’s languages, tootsing the birds

You are who I love, behind the library desk, leaving who might kill you, crying with the love songs, polishing your shoes, lighting the candles, getting through the first day despite the whisperers sniping fail fail fail

You are who I love, you who beat and did not beat the odds, you who knows that any good thing you have is the result of someone else’s sacrifice, work, you who fights for reparations

You are who I love, you who stands at the courthouse with the sign that reads NO JUSTICE, NO PEACE

You are who I love, singing Leonard Cohen to the snow, you with glitter on your face, wearing a kilt and violet lipstick

You are who I love, sighing in your sleep

You, playing drums in the procession, you feeding the chickens and humming as you hem the skirt, you sharpening the pencil, you writing the poem about the loneliness of the astronaut

You wanting to listen, you trying to be so still

You are who I love, mothering the dogs, standing with horses

You in brightness and in darkness, throwing your head back as you laugh, kissing your hand

You carrying the berbere from the mill, and the jug of oil pressed from the olives of the trees you belong to

You studying stars, you are who I love
braiding your child’s hair

You are who I love, crossing the desert and trying to cross the desert

You are who I love, working the shifts to buy books, rice, tomatoes,

bathing your children as you listen to the lecture, heating the kitchen with the oven, up early, up late

You are who I love, learning English, learning Spanish, drawing flowers on your hand with a ballpoint pen, taking the bus home

You are who I love, speaking plainly about your pain, sucking your teeth at the airport terminal television every time the politicians say something that offends your sense of decency, of thought, which is often

You are who I love, throwing your hands up in agony or disbelief, shaking your head, arguing back, out loud or inside of yourself, holding close your incredulity which, yes, too, I love I love

your working heart, how each of its gestures, tiny or big, stand beside my own agony, building a forest there

How “Fuck you” becomes a love song

You are who I love, carrying the signs, packing the lunches, with the rain on your face

You at the edges and shores, in the rooms of quiet, in the rooms of shouting, in the airport terminal, at the bus depot saying “No!” and each of us looking out from the gorgeous unlikelihood of our lives at all, finding ourselves here, witnesses to each other’s tenderness, which, this moment, is fury, is rage, which, this moment, is another way of saying: You are who I love You are who I love You and you and you are who

a writing prompt

What does the poem inspire in you? Perhaps a list of those you see and love—expansive, like the poet’s? A list of those you see and have a hard time loving? A list of what you cannot love? A list of who loves you?

What list will you make today?

Typically I advocate letting our pens move quickly across the page, but for this prompt, let’s try to follow McEntyre’s advice: “When you make a list, if you stay with it and take it slowly, take it seriously but playfully, give yourself plenty of permission to put down whatever comes up, you begin to clarify your values, your concerns, the direction your life is taking, your relationship to your inner voice, your humor, your secrets. You discover the larger things that lists can reveal.”

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.

Know someone who might enjoy this prompt or others? Please share!

Each week I share some ideas and a writing prompt, meant to be jumping-off points. Use the prompts however you like—to journal, to draft a writing project, as prayer ideas, or for another creative endeavor. If this one doesn’t resonate, look back through the archive for more. Clicking the heart to like this post helps keep my writing prompts visible and my own writer’s heart grateful.

Photo by Hope House Press - Leather Diary Studio on Unsplash

Note: I am a bookshop.org affiliate. If you use my links to purchase a book through an independent bookstore (yay you!) I may receive a small commission.