Listen to an Uncommon Conversation from September 17th, 2008 – 10 Poems in 10 Weeks by 10 Coaches

Listen to the recording below:

This is the second call in this series of ten.

What does poetry have to do with coaching? Everything!

Change is in the wind. As the fall season begins, a new series of uncommon conversations unfolds. Think Ten. Ten poems in ten weeks featuring ten unique coaches will launch on September 10 at noon EDT.

Host: Ellen Bass, Poet
Date: Wednesday September 17th
Time: 12:00pm eastern

Selected Poem: “Gate C22″ by Ellen Bass

Using Roger Housden’s final book in his ten poem series, ‚Äö√Ñ√∫Ten Poems to Change your Life Again and Again,‚Äö√Ñ√π we will explore the poem for the first half of the hour, and how it relates to our coaching practices in the second half of the hour.

Gate C22

At gate C22 in the Portland airport
a man in a broad-band leather hat kissed
a woman arriving from Orange County.
They kissed and kissed and kissed. Long after
the other passengers clicked the handles of their carry-ons
and wheeled briskly toward short-term parking,
the couple stood there, arms wrapped around each other
like she’d just staggered off the boat at Ellis Island,
like she’d been released from ICU, snapped
out of a coma, survived bone cancer, made it down
from Annapurna in only the clothes she was wearing.

Neither of them was young. His beard was gray.
She carried a few extra pounds you can imagine
her saying she had to lose. But they kissed lavish
kisses like the ocean in the early morning,
the way it gathers and swells, sucking
each rock under, swallowing it
again and again. We were all watching –
passengers waiting for the delayed flight
to San Jose, the stewardesses, the pilots,
the aproned woman icing Cinnabons, the man selling
sunglasses. We couldn’t look away. We could
taste the kisses crushed in our mouths.

But the best part was his face. When he drew back
and looked at her, his smile soft with wonder, almost
as though he were a mother still open from giving birth,
as your mother must have looked at you, no matter
what happened after — if she beat you or left you or
you’re lonely now –you once lay there, the vernix
not yet wiped off, and someone gazed at you
as you were the first sunrise seen from the Earth.
The whole wing of the airport hushed,
all of us trying to slip into that women’s middle-
aged body,
her plaid Bermuda shorts, sleeveless blouse, glasses,
little gold hoop earrings, tilting our heads up.

From “Ten Poems to Change your Life Again and Again”
by Roger Housden

Be prepared to be surprised at the power of poetry and the uncommon conversation that is created.

And plan to Join us on Wednesday: September 24 for the discussion of “Each Moment A White Bull Steps Shining Into The World” by Jane Hirshfield.

This series is produced by Katherine Gotshall English.

As always, please post your thoughts/questions below.