How do you capture a single moment in a place you’ve called home for most of your life? Much less distill it into 15 words?

The possibilities are endless, encounters with woodchucks, a conversation with a friend, experiencing the floods, hunting morels, moonlit swims on Lake Redstone, the moment when swallows leave, luring a swarm of bees, the smell of spring soil, whew! We are grateful to have the land, our community and our imagination guide us. The end results are surprisingly asymetrically greater than the sum of its singular words—sunflower synergy

Seriously, this past winter Rob and I traded our broadforks and spades for pens and paper, digging into brevity in the hopes that we can tell a story or two about what we love about our home in the shape of a 15 Word Poem. This was part of the 20 Poems Project, convened by Reedsburg ArtsLink.

Words, like seeds, need a bit of dormancy before sprouting. They also need a little tending to before a plant or poem is born. I am grateful for to the editing eyes of writer friends, and fellow ‘Poetry for Everyone Workshop’ classmates (I gifted myself this class through Madison College for my 40th birthday). After three months and several iterations, we just learned that each of us will have a poem highlighted as part of the 20 Poems project.

We hope that you will join Rob and I and other local poets at the Reedsburg Public Library on Thursday April 25, 6:30 PM, in reading our poems that were selected for the project. Poems will later appear on hand-lettered surfaces in downtown Reedsburg, and become part of an ongoing Poetry Scavenger Hunt. Maps will be available at the Reedsburg Area Chamber of Commerce in the summer of 2019.

O.k. and spoiler alert, here are the poems we wrote for those who can’t make the reading, you’ll just have to wander until you stumble across it in Reedsburg!