 Well, as you probably know, April is Poetry Month, and we're here to celebrate. Our event today is called Poetic Pairings, How Poetry Speaks. And the idea behind this event is that if we look at how poetry can inspire and motivate us and sometimes get us through difficult times, there's something there. There's something we can learn from that. So what we've done with this event is identified ten members of the Sheboygan community who've stepped forward and are willing to share a poem that had some significance to them in their lives. And then we've paired the community member with a poet who will respond, and the response might be something they wrote themselves, or it might be something they knew of out in the world that they felt was a good response. And you'll find we're going to have some interesting surprises too, some interesting back and forth. So I like to think of it as though it's dancing with the stars, but in poetry form. And so we have ten pairs to get through, and I've invited the community member to share a little very briefly why they picked the poem that they did, so they will do that. And then we'll take it from there. It's going to be a fun afternoon. Thank you all for being here. So sit back, relax, and enjoy Poetic Pairings, How Poetry Speaks. Let me invite up our first pair. So would you come forward, the two of you? And maybe let's always have the community member at this podium, and the poet always at that podium. Yes. Julia Hollister is co-pastor with her husband Jim at First Congregational United Church of Christ here in Treboygan. Georgia Ressmeyer is a poet, a retired legal services attorney, and the daughter of a Lutheran pastor. So let's see what they have for you. I chose the Seven of Pentacles, Marge Piercy as my poem. And I knew what kind of day it was going to be today. So I knew it was a gorgeous day, and that we would bring the out of doors into this setting. I chose the poem because I think it's full of positive change. So under the sky, under a sky, the color of pea soup, she's looking at her work growing away there actively, thickly like grape vines or pole beans, as things grow in the real world slowly enough. If you tend them properly, if you mulch, if you water, if you provide birds that eat insects a home in winter food, if the sun shines and you pick off caterpillars, if the praying mantis comes and the ladybugs and the bees, then the plants flourish. But at their own internal clock, connections are made slowly. Sometimes they grow underground. You cannot tell always by looking what is happening. More than half the tree is spread out in the soil under your feet. Penetrate quietly as the earthworm that blows no trumpet. Fight persistently as the creeper that brings down the tree. Spread like the squash plant that overruns the garden. Gnaw in the dark and use the sun to make sugar. Weave real connections. Create real nodes. Build real houses. Live a life you can endure. Make love that is loving. Keep tangling and interweaving and taking more in. A thicket, a bramble wilderness to the outside, but to us interconnected with rabbit runs and burrows and layers. Live as if you liked yourself. And it may happen. Reach out. Keep reaching out. Keep bringing in. This is how we're going to live for a long time. Not always. For every gardener knows that after the digging, after the planting, after the long season of tending and growing, the harvest comes. I inherited a garden with my house. And I've never had a vegetable garden. And if I did, I'm sure it wouldn't be all that well tended. So the part of the poem that resonated with me was the part about the thicket and bramble wilderness. I excel at raspberries. And as you may know or may not know, they just grow wherever they want. And so that's what my poem is about. It's called, well, I'll read the three lines from March Piercy, the poem you just heard, that I liked so much. Keep tangling and interweaving and taking more in. A thicket and bramble wilderness to the outside, but to us interconnected with rabbit runs and burrows and layers. The poem is called, The Wild Unruly. As a frozen raspberry harvested in summer, thaws on my tongue. I don't picture well tended gardens. I see the wild unruly ones whose Japanese beetles are not picked off and crushed or drowned in soapy water, but left to chew a few raspberry leaves into delicate lace. Gardens where robins, rabbits, squirrels, insects, devour the berries I drop. Help themselves when I'm indoors, not keeping up. And where raspberry runners spread underground like probing fingers pop up in the grass between prickly pears in Columbine clumps. Might even emerge through the crown of my head if I stand still long enough for them to infiltrate my shoes and feet. I try not to clutter my brain with preconceptions and rules concerning the behavior of others, animal, vegetable, or mineral, just as I strive to keep my channels open to the nudge of compassion, inspiration, wonder, love. Let earth wisdom climb the ladder of my spine, poke through my skull, and crown me as she does to anyone who waits with green and shining laurels, not as a prize for being the best at a particular task, but as a reward for working with not against nature. Thank you. Thank you so much. Pair number two, would you two please come up? Pair number two, so we'll have Peruvian-born Jose Araujo came to Wisconsin in 2003, yes, to attend Lakeland University. He is now a marketing analyst at Kohler Company. And Catherine Gull is a poet and a writer, a ballroom dancer, and one of Appleton's story catchers. If you want to know what a story catcher is, you'll have to ask her at some point. She may have to sneak out a little early, but we'll let you know. So Catherine, come. OK, good afternoon, everyone. So happy to be here. Thank you for an invitation, Lisa. So when Lisa called and reached out and asked to think about a poem that I could write and share with you here today, I started thinking about, not very much of poems or I don't read it myself, but I started thinking about what brings back memories. And I thought about a poem of a poet called Cesar Vallejo, a Peruvian poet. He was born in northern part of Peru back in the late 1800s. But I'm reading today a poem that we, when we're little, fourth, fifth grade, we are forced to learn when we're in school, right? And so it's very engraved in our minds. And it becomes also a part of our popular culture because of the first line. And I'll read the first line and you'll see why. Vallejo only wrote three books in his entire life. But after writing those three books and publishing those three books, he became one of the most popular and the most significant poet in Peruvian literature and one of the most significant in Latin American literature as well. So the poem is called Los Heraldos Negros or The Black Heralds. Hay golpes en la vida tan fuertes, yo no sé. Golpes como del odio de Dios, como si ante ellos, la resaca de todo lo sufrido se imposara en el alma. Yo no sé. Son pocos, pero son. Abren zanjas oscuras en el rostro más fiero y en el omo más fuerte. Serán tal vez los potros de bárbaro satilas o los heraldos negros que nos manda la muerte. Son las caídas ondas de los cristos del alma, de alguna fe adorable que en el destino blasfema. Esos golpes sangrientos son las crepitaciones de algún pan que en la puerta del horno se nos quema. Y el hombre, pobre, pobre, vuelve los ojos como cuando por sobre el hombro nos llama una palmada. Vuelve los ojos locos y todo lo vivido se imposa como un charco de culpa en la mirada. Hay golpes tan fuertes en la vida, yo no sé. The black heralds, there are in life such hard blows, I don't know. Blows seemingly from God's worth as if before them the undertow of all of our sufferings is embedded in our souls. I don't know. There are few, but are, opening dark burrows in the fiercest of faces and the strongest of loins. They are perhaps the cults of barbarica tilas or the dark herald death senses. They are the deep falls of the Christ of the soul, of some adorable one that destiny blasphemes. Those bloody blows are the crepitations of some bread getting burned on us by the oven store. And the men, poor, poor, he turns his eyes around, like when padding calls us upon our shoulder. He turns his crazed madden eyes and all of life's experiences become stagnant, like a puddle of guilt in a daze. There are such hard blows in life, I don't know. Thank you, Jose. Jose and I were randomly paired, but I now know there is no such thing as a random pairing. My family and I have taken hard blows also, and there are days that I say I don't know. On June 3, 2014, my daughter received a long sentence for a crime no one saw coming. Last summer, I wrote a memoir in verse called It Sounds Crazy. It is dedicated to her and to every anxious new mother. The entries are numbered, and I'm going to read entry number 11. The day after I visit my daughter in prison, I try to reach out. Yet how do I tell the story of what I cannot see when strangeness lines my lexicon? The prism of pain is what makes a prison, not the crimes, time served, a future devoid of hugs and touch, how one cellmate rips off another's sugar, or the inane claim she stole the scent out of another's shower gel, the mayhem and paperwork when one punches another. All of it, stranger than a stranger in a strange land, stranger anxiety, stranger than fiction. I use the word strange a thousand times, forward, backward, tossed in a circle, in a thousand sentences as if practice makes poetry, as if the prism of mental illness could morph into a thousand synonyms for a syntax caught and decoded by the forensic psychiatrist who interviewed her for six hours while she was handcuffed, ankles shackled to a chair, a velcroed suicide suit, her only garment in the Milwaukee County jail, stiff and cold to keep her from danger, from damage already done. Unbearable woe that froze her drove her to despair after the fiance's rejection stirred up memory in her muscles, in her tongue, how even as a child, she could not find her feelings, could not speak after her papa ran out. Literally disappeared when her brother was nine and she, 12, entering the minefield of seventh grade. Her brother required crutches, conversion syndrome, it's called, a return to toddlerhood where he needed help to balance, to put one foot in front of the other. And she, well, believing nearly killed her, though she never shed a tear, kept every fear sealed. The papa's sudden break followed 25 years later by a fiance moving out on her and their toddler on the dark side of midnight in the worst winter since 1936, led her to believe she was, quote, globally unlovable. The psychiatrist wrote in his report, it sounds crazy, a childhood trauma, cloudy with a chance of disaster, but locked in, guarded and safe as cement until life circumstances cracked it open, I don't know, I don't know, became her refrain. The shame of a misfit, a preteen with a father who went so far afield, he landed in another country, while a gloomy undertow of the soul crawled over her and my son and me. Thank you both. There's some amazing things that have come out of the pairings for sure. And thank you, Catherine, and thank you, Jose, for that. Pair number three. Can Heather and John come up? And we'll have Heather here, right? No, wait, Heather over there. Yeah, that's OK. That's all right. We're mixing it up. I got confused. Heather Cleveland is the executive director of Nourish Farms, and she says she is passionate about food, people, and the environment. And John Sierpinski is a poet living in Plymouth whose work has been published in many literary journals. And these guys actually are going to surprise us, not just with two poems, but with three. Thank you, Lisa. The poem I'm going to read is called Today by Mary Oliver. I first heard of Mary Oliver at an interview with Krista Tippett, and the poem Today, which I often, in my head, refer to it as Stillness, speaks to me often in that I find it hard to relax. So I find this poem something that I think about often when I'm trying to relax, tell myself to relax. Today by Mary Oliver. Today I'm flying low, and I'm not saying a word. I'm letting all the voodoo's of ambition sleep. The world goes on as it must, the bees in the garden rumbling a little, the fish leaping, the gnats getting eaten, and so forth. But I'm taking the day off, quiet as a feather. I hardly move, though really I'm traveling a terrific distance, Stillness, one of their doors into the temple. This poem is about a stolen holiday. It's not always what it seems. This was a poem of mine. It was published in the University of the Redlands in California. Sick Monday. Even the slant of the sun shouts, it's Monday. Get to work. And it doesn't care if I've already called in sick. Monday tells me there's proof everyone else is now at work, or going to, or in jail, or mental hospitals. Even at home, work owns me. I should feel great, but I don't. Ah, Monday with its stark and real ice chill. Monday with its groan of blown finances, foreboding, and lost dreams. Monday's ashen sun creeps through tunnels of twisted black legs, thick conifers, shadow grass. My job grins sinister. Monday says, back to work. Never mind that you're off. You, yes, you must be at work. Most of us already are. You will be productive. You can be conscientious. You must lead the other workers. You won't fall back asleep. We can't let you, at least until the phlegm of Tuesday. So after reading John's poem in response to my poem, I kind of came full circle to a work of poems by Philip Levine that I had been reading through, thinking I think one of these poems will fit well. My husband, Adam, listened to John read poem last year at the same event. And so when I brought up the idea of this particular poem, Lisa loved the idea of us reading this one as well. So we're both going to read a poem called, What Work Is by Philip Levine? We stand in the rain in a long line waiting at Ford Highland Park for work. You know what work is. If you're old enough to read this, you know what work is, although you may not want to do it. Forget you. This is about waiting, shifting from one foot to another, feeling the light rain falling like mist into your hair, blurring your vision until you think you see your own brother ahead of you, maybe 10 places. You rub your glasses with your fingers, and of course it's someone else's brother, narrower across the shoulders than yours, but with the same sad slouch, the grin that does not hide the stubbornness, the sad refusal to give in to rain, to the hours wasted waiting. To the knowledge that somewhere ahead a man is waiting who will say, no, we're not hiring today for any reason he wants. You love your brother, now suddenly you can hardly stand the love flooding you for your brother who's not beside you, or behind, or ahead because he's home trying to sleep off a miserable night shift at Cadillac so he can get up before noon to study his German. Works eight hours a night so he can sing Wagner, the opera you hate the most, the worst music ever invented. How long has it been since you told him you loved him, held his wide shoulders, opened your eyes wide and said those words and maybe kissed his cheek? You've never done something so simple, so obvious, not because you're too young or too dumb, not because you're jealous or even mean or incapable of crying in the presence of another man. No, just because you don't know what work is. Thank you guys for that. That's good stuff. Our next pair, can Sharon and Carolee come forward? Let's see, where am I put, community? You're over there, can you be there? Sharon Evans is an EL, or English language teacher in Sheboygan area school district and Carolee Mannis is a poet, an assistant editor of Seams Poetry Magazine and a senior writing major at Lakeland University. I discovered this poem by Langston Hughes when I was in high school and it has reminded me throughout my life that things don't need to remain as they are, that I can dream. Poem is called Dreams. Hold fast to dreams, for if dreams die, life is a broken winged bird that cannot fly. Hold fast to dreams, for when dreams go, life is a barren field, frozen with snow. And the way I came to my poem was Sharon's reminded me of a poem. I couldn't remember the title, who it was by, or really anything about it, so I had a vague idea of it and I went searching forward on the internet and I did not find it, but I did find this poem. So this is Let Me Not Mar that Perfect Dream by Emily Dickinson. Let me not mar that perfect dream, buy in a rural stain, but so adjust my daily night that it will come again. Not when we know the power of costs, the garment of surprise, was all a Tim and Mother War at home in paradise. That I would do whatever I got, yeah. So okay, because they each had two really short poems that were eight lines, I said, when they practiced, I said, you guys, we should try something really weird, you should mash them together. So I forgot to tell you, they were gonna do this. So we're gonna go back and forth, line by line by line by line, Langston Hughes, Emily Dickinson. Two poems about dreams, it's kind of cool, so listen, listen up. Hold fast to dreams. Let me not mar that perfect dream, for if dreams die, buy in a rural stain, life is a broken wing bird, but so adjust my daily night that it cannot fly, that it will come again. Hold fast to dreams. Not when we know the power of costs, for when dreams go, the garment of surprise, life is a barren field, was all a Tim and Mother War, frozen with snow, at home in paradise. Dancing with the stars, awesome. Thank you guys, thank you. Oh whoa, okay, we're on to page two. Pair number five, Nia Yang, can you, Nia and Sylvia, come up. We have Nia over there. Nia Yang is an award-winning media communications and marketing professional. Sylvia Kavanaugh is a poet and a social studies teacher at North High School, thank you. What I have is actually a poem, it's a song, it's called Glory, it's by Kamin and John Legend, it was written for the 2014 film Selma, which is about civil rights. I actually didn't find it from watching Selma, I actually found it on my Spotify election playlist right before the election. Really loved it, and then the election happened and then I realized this song has even more meaning now. And still resonates today as it did in 1964, I think it was. And so for me, as a person of faith, it also holds additional meaning because I know that the troubles that we have in this world today will find glory in our next lifetime. One day when the glory comes, it'll be ours, it'll be ours. Oh, one day when the war is won, we'll be sure, we'll be sure, oh glory, glory, oh glory, glory. Hands to the heavens, no man, no weapon. Formed against, yes glory is destined. Every day women and men become legends since they go against our skin, become blessings. The movement is a rhythm to us. Freedom is like religion to us. Justice is juxtaposition in us. Justice for all, just ain't specific enough. One son died, his bear is revisiting in us. True and living, living in us, resistance is us. That's why Rosa sat on the bus. That's why we walk through Ferguson with our hands up. When it go down, we women and men up. They say, stay down and we stand up. Shots, we on the ground, the camera panned up. King pointed to the mountaintop and we ran up. One day when the glory comes, it'll be ours, it'll be ours. Oh, one day when the war is won, we will be sure, we will be sure, oh glory, glory, oh glory, glory. Now the war is not over, victory isn't won. It will fight on to the finish, then what's all done. We'll cry glory, oh glory, we'll cry glory, oh glory. I decided to write a golden shovel poem for this. And what that means is I took a line from the poem, glory. And the line that I took becomes the last word in each of the lines of my poem. So that line can read vertically down the right hand side of my poem. So the poem is called, after a long day Rosa rests on the mountaintop. And the line is King pointed to the mountaintop and we ran up. In the quiet finale of her struggle, a king said walk for 381 inclement days. She pointed the path in resting, poofed herself from unseen to seen. Jim Crow Laws, the southern tradition and the police with dogs, fester infetted cesspool below the mountain. While those who hard climb and finally reach the top rejoice in proclaiming oneness with the stars and often weep to view the world so vast. Eons ago we stepped into golden grass, danced for ancestors and ran as one in and out of Africa. Rosa sits down and people rise up. Thank you, thank you both. Pair number six, two gentlemen coming up here. And we'll have Tim over there, Luke over here. Where is my, oh sorry, pair number six. Tim Ebenreider, Tim's family owned and operated the Ebenreider Woodworking Company that has become under Tim's guidance the Ebco Venture Center home to a variety of pursuits including the Sheboygan Visual Artists. And Luke Yulitowsky is a sophomore studying writing at Lakeland University and the two of them are going to share a poem and I'll let Tim introduce the poem. Okay, hi, I chose a poem by Rudyard Kipling and I'll bet instantly in your mind you're saying oh that's the if one because everybody knows it. I chose it because my dad first read it to me and I'll bet he read it to some of you, maybe all of you, your dad that is. And second because it's stuck with me and if you heard it before I'm sure it has stuck with you. In fact, you can sing along if you'd like. And third I chose it because I still like poems that rhyme and this one does and as a byproduct of choosing it I got to meet my new buddy Luke who will begin if by Rudyard Kipling. If you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs and blaming it on you. If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you but make allowance for their doubting to if you can wait and not be tired by waiting or being lied about, don't deal in lies or being hated and don't give way to hating and yet don't look too good or talk too wise. If you can dream and not make dreams your master if you can think and not make thoughts your aim. If you can meet with triumph and disaster and treat those two imposters just the same. If you can bear to hear the truth you've spoken twisted by naves to make a trap for fools or watch the things you gave your life to broken and stoop and build them up with worn out tools. If you can make one heap of all your winnings and risk it on one turn of pitch and toss. And lose and start again at your beginnings and never breathe a word about your loss. If you can force your heart and nerve and sin you to serve your turn long after they are gone. And so hold on when there's nothing left in you except the will that says to them, hold on. If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue or walk with kings nor lose the common touch. If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you. If all men count with you but none too much. If you can fill the unforgiving minute with 60 seconds worth of distance run. Then yours is the earth and all that's in it. And what's more you'll be a man my son. Excellent and I love the theater of this event. I love how people it shows us how poetry really has meaning. Sometimes poetry seems like it's out there but it's in our hearts and I think this event shows us that. So thank you. So pair number seven can Mary Lynn and Heather come up? And I'll have you there Mary Lynn. Great. Mary Lynn Donahue is a retired lawyer and serves as an older person on the Shpoigen City Council. Heather Sheetz is a poet and an English and Humanities teacher at Ideas Academy and I will let them introduce their poems. Well Tim and Luke, if sounds just like a common council meeting. So you're right there is a certain amount of drama that one would not expect. I discovered poetry when I was a freshman in college. I started at Lawrence University and I found that I was not the only tormented person in the world and gathered these poets to me like Theater Refki and Muriel Rookheiser and Adrian Rich. And so when Lisa asked me to read a poem I thought well I am just going to go to one of these favorite poets of mine and find a lovely poem to read and I couldn't do it. It was just too close, too personal. It's an odd thing but it's like no that's me and that doesn't get put out there so. But T.S. Eliot gets put out there. This book, in the old days I wrote my address in every book so I know that I read this poem and all these wonderful poems in the Four Quartets in 1971 and I found this poem when it was a spring winter day. The nice thing about little getting and the particular short piece that I will read, a little getting is a small village in England is that it's a little bit more than it seems on the surface at least to me. Midwinter spring is its own season. Sempaternal though sodden towards sundown suspended in time between pole and tropic. When the short day is brightest with frost and fire the brief sun flames the ice on pools and ditches in windless cold that is the heart's heat. Reflecting in a watery mirror a glare that is blindness in the early afternoon and glows more intense than blaze of branch or brazier stirs the dumb spirit. No wind but Pentecostal fire in the dark time of the year. Between melting and freezing the soul's sap quivers. There's no earth smell or smell of living thing. This is springtime but not in times covenant. Now the hedgerow is blanched for an hour with transitory blossom of snow. A bloom more sudden than that of summer neither budding nor failing nor in the scheme of generation where is the summer? The unimaginable zero summer. If you came this way taking the route you would be likely to take from the place you would be likely to come from. If you came this way in May time you would find the hedges white again in May with voluptuary sweetness. It would be the same at the end of the journey if you came at night like a broken king. If you came by day not knowing what you came for it would be the same when you leave the rough road and turn behind the pigsty to the dull facade and the tombstone. And what you thought you came for is only a shell a husk of meaning from which the purpose breaks only when it is fulfilled if at all. Either you had no purpose or the purpose is beyond the end you figured and is altered in fulfillment. There are other places which are also the world's end some at sea jaws or over a dark lake in a desert or a city but this is the nearest in place and time now and in England. When Mary sent me that poem it was during the winter and that is when my sister was thinking about coming home from Africa. She was over there on a mission trip and she was struggling to decide if she was coming home. And the little getting piece reminded me that we are all broken kings carrying around our own husks of seasons and experiences. So this is my response and now you can all know the title of it which is you reign when you return. You sit there and write your resignation and cough blood and dust into the napkin between sips of coffee and bites of peanut butter and jelly so American at this coffee shop in Kalamazoo. It's the end of the rainy season in Nukuru meaning it's the start of spring here. A month ago your message said you were sick you wanted to come home the police officer made you buy him lunch the taxi driver told you to go buy something a little less Western maybe a da maybe wear a scarf. I sat at work and watched the rain beat on the gutter as the sun moved the day I was waiting to call you then miss you. I left you a message saying we all have to change not really meaning it saying that sometimes I wake up unable to remember where I am which city which time which bed. When I drove you home from the airport we did not speak where was that back talker that skydiver that risky sleeper your eyes sunk so low into the skull. It's I was startled when you fell asleep. You woke up in a pool of sweat with hair left on the back of the head rest. We have ordered more tests. I wonder who you are and why. I wonder how you know God has called you. I wonder if there is any racer he uses on everyone to prepare them for the christening that smears the final vestiges of home that rolls up the identity of an artist into little rubber shavings. You treat me like the adversary when you come home because it was winter for so long where you were that now even spring seems like an enemy. The bowl and spoon you purchased so confidently in your 20s you gave away to become a missionary and returned empty. Thank you both. It's beautiful. Okay, pair number eight come on up and we'll have Danny over here and Sean over there. Sean Christian has a wide experience in the banking industry. He came to Sheboygan from India in 2002. Danielle Livingston is a poet and a senior at Lakeland University graduating this spring with a double major in writing and psychology. So my poem is, okay in US you say poem and in India you say poem. So you say it exactly the same way. So the reading mother was by Strickland Gilliland. In India you had to memorize just like Jose said you had to memorize everything and say it out. At that time I didn't like it because you know I had to memorize it as a school student. So but this poem stuck with me reason as my mom I'm very close to her and when I read this poem it always reminds me of my mother. So I had a mother who read to me sagas of pirates who scored the sea. Cutlass clenched in the yellow teeth. Black birds stood in the hole beneath. I had a mother who read me lays of ancient and gallant in golden days. Stories of Merriman and Ivanhoe which every child has a right to know. I had a mother who read me tales of Gillard the hound of hills of Wales true to his trust till the tragic death faithless lent with his final breath. I had a mother who read me these things that wholesomeness life to the child heart brings. Stories that stir with an upward touch oh that each mother were such. You may have tangible wealth untold. Cascades of jewels and copper of gold. Richer than I had. Richer than I you can never be. I had a mother who read to me. Is a tongue twister. So the poem I chose I wrote last June for the book I self-published and I decided to take a poem that has a different view on writing and so this poem is based on a bibliophobia which is the fear of books and reading because I think I'm hilarious and I put that into a book and I think that's just so funny. So we're going to read this poem just like we did the last one so we'll switch off on stanzas and this poem is called to die another day. Reading is psychotic. Letters and symbols spawn hallucinations for oddly willing but unsuspecting victims. Ampersands the most atrocious a broken infinity to remind one that forever cannot be yet still promises an end. A mischievous perpetrator. Libraries, bookstores, office frightening. Thousands and millions of lives shelved for others to stare at to hear voices to see lives that do not exist. To have a relief hardship only to die again. And what if one died while in the middle of a narrative do the lives of those in the tale end to write in the midst of. Thank you. Thank you. Pair number nine, Trisha and Jean. If you've been wondering why this is here this is going to all become apparent now. Trisha has a prop. All right, let me introduce. Trisha Martin says she lives in the gig economy. She has a private piano studio where she teaches students from age three till, I don't know, old 77. She also teaches preschool three days a week and she accompanies playing piano at UW-Shabuigan. Jean Began is a poet and is retired from special ed both teaching and administration in the Chicago public school system and she lives now in Manitowoc. So take it away ladies. I'm going to try and hold myself to this area here and read for you autobiography in five short chapters by Portia Nelson. And I came upon this poem at a kind of dark period in my life and I realized now it repeats over and over. I walked down the street. There's a deep hole in the sidewalk. I fall in. It isn't my fault. It takes me forever to get out. I walk down the same street. There's a deep hole in the sidewalk. I pretend I don't see it. I fall in again. I can't believe I'm in the same place but it isn't my fault. It still takes a long time to get out. I walk down the same street. There's a deep hole in the sidewalk. I see it there. I still fall in. It's a habit. My eyes are open. I know where I am. It is my fault. I get out immediately. I walk down the same street. There's a deep hole in the sidewalk. I walk around it. I walk down a different street. When Tricia sent me that poem right away I knew I had to read this poem I wrote back when I was at the stage. That was the stage of I am lost. I am helpless. It isn't my fault. It takes me forever to find a way out. And I submitted it to a regional competition all back about 15 years ago that had the theme of self-portrait. And this was a good self-portrait of myself at the time. Jubilation. The woman walking there along Ashland Avenue thinks the thought of despair recalling how Abraham Maslow said by her age she'd be fulfilled and how Eric Erickson claimed her feelings would be marked by trust. If she'd gone through that stage properly when she was six or seven or maybe one she isn't sure what age but knowing she's failed to cut off wonders if she'll ever make the grade of normalcy. The billboard troubles her with faces of a smiling family all hunkered down over pizza and free snacks fairly oozing with sweet frosting. Never once does she ever stop to jump ship from her mental skin to realize she'd been the fool more than a psych 101 flunk out thinking her textbooks were really true until this quirky magical minute. She theorizes she could have been born aboriginal. An aboriginal pines never worries what King Freud or Lee Harvey Oswald said or did. The little hunter merely leaps about with his boomerang mind conjuring up his own totem pole princedom. And the woman sees she could lasso her a happy mood or cosmos too. Mesmerized now she suddenly is freed from boxes she'd pined in since before kindergarten and certainly during second grade. Thus she commands a new plethora of bliss that is pleasant and relaxing like giving up an old addiction. And every so often she recognizes the fresh invisible universe and cluttered with spearman gum wrappers and drapery styles and outlines of resonance in high definition wall hung foreign import TVs. Thank you guys. Thank you both. Well we are at pair number 10. Ted and Marilyn come forward and I have announcements but I'm going to make them at the end so you guys come up. Ted there. Ted Ham is the director of the Etude schools here in Sheboygan and Marilyn Zelke Windau is a poet and a retired art teacher who lives in Sheboygan Falls and they too had an interesting serendipity in their pairing and that will become revealed in a moment. So I selected a poem Love by Billy Collins and then I didn't and it kind of came back to I had this book of my first like new book of poetry was this day by Wendell Berry and it was lost in an unfortunate series of events and I happened to after getting the email from Lisa had gone back and purchased this book again and because I finally came to that realization that it was okay for me to purchase poetry books in my 40s like for some reason like I reached a life event where it was okay to do it so I purchased this one and I already emailed Lisa and done the Billy Collins and then I just happened to sit down right after emailing her and I read this poem and it spoke to me in such a way that I immediately said never mind I've got a new one and it turned out to have some serendipity here so it seems like it was meant to be so this is Wendell does such an awful job of naming his poems because this is the Sabbath poem 1993 number two when my father was an old man past 80 years we sat together on the porch in silence in the dark finally he said will I have had a wonderful life adding after a long pause and I've had nothing to do with it we were silent for a while again and then I asked well do you believe in the informed decision he thought some more and at last said out of the darkness no he was right for when we choose the way by which our only life is lived we choose and do not know what we have chosen for this is the heart's choice not the mind's to be true to the mind to be true to the heart's one choice is the long labor of the mind he chose imperfectly as we must the rule of love and learned through years of light what darkly he had chosen his life his place our place our lives and now comes one he chose but will not see Emily Rose born May 2nd, 1993 when I got this poem and I started to read it and the relationship between the poet and the father and I got to the last and it says Emily May 2nd my poem is called heart's choice ah May 2nd my mother's birthday born in 1913 it's a time of wildflower seeking on the now abandoned tracks of the interurban railway in Big Bend, Wisconsin tracks which led her to advanced years of high school in West Alice then on to college at Whitewater in 1930 in 1953 she led my toddler brother my older sister and I down that green wide path now vacated by the train she'd ventured on as a girl she'd stop us for blood roots for violets for anemones she sheltered those picked blossoms in small glasses giving them water to make our way home to Chicago as a child I saw them on the counter in the kitchen next to the sink their morning beauty rising they were reminders to her of a wonderful life a life of light in the dawn of wonder in sunset her girlhood, Wisconsin farm home when I asked my mother when my mother was an older woman of 83 I asked her to fill out forms about resuscitation and food tubes medical directives and last wishes she asked me if the trumpet lilies were blooming she lived to be 94 loved to listen to Chopin's moonlight sonata which she had played dad's favorite on the piano watched for cardinals outside her nursing home window which she swore her dead relatives come to visit asked me if the magenta violets were blooming in my yard she never met her great-grandchildren thank you to all the poets and community members today I actually don't make a distinction I mean I think everyone has that poetic spirit in them and some of us write it down some of us read it and I hope that today's presentation kind of woke up a little something inside all of us and that we'll all go home and pull some poetry books off the shelves or go to the library this library has a wonderful collection of poetry and you know it helps us it helps us ask questions poetry we see new things we discover things so you know don't be afraid of poetry really wonderful thing let's applaud once again all the poets and community members