This morning, I went on Lynn Ungar’s Facebook page to find a poem she posted weeks ago. While I was looking for it, other poems of hers leapt out at me – “In the Moment,” “Badly,” and “A Letter in Return” – just to name a few. They grabbed me and forced me to read each of them slowly, and then again and again, until I had taken them in.
In many of her poems, such as “In the Moment” below, there is a gentle, almost chiding, call to step back from railing that “everything has gone off script” – which is both futile and exhausting – and instead “play the scene you’re in.” For isn’t that all we can really do?
But rather than leave us in what might seem a bleak, depressing, giving in/giving up state or one that asks us to be more Zen-like “being in the moment” than we have the energy or temperament for – she reminds us of the promising and creative “yes/and” of improv. She suggests that we can “shift the plot” and importantly, that we are not alone.
I read the poem over and over …gaining the measure of peace that it offers.
Hours later, I am still under its spell.
Is Ungar a wizard, a magician? Perhaps. Perhaps all the best poets are. Expressing the inexpressible, writing a few lines that speak volumes, and focusing our attention on what matters.
Whatever she may be, I am grateful for her magic and share a portion of it here with you.
Lynn Ungar’s “In the Moment”
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