Center for Journal Therapy
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Poem of the Month: August 2004

Numbers I like the generosity of numbers. The way, for example, they are willing to count anything or anyone: two pickles, one door to the room, eight dancers dressed as swans. I like the domesticity of addition-- add two cups of milk and stir-- the sense of plenty: six plums on the ground, three more falling from the tree. And multiplication's school of fish times fish, whose silver bodies breed beneath the shadow of a boat. Even subtraction is never loss, just addition somewhere else: five sparrows take away two, the two in someone else's garden now. There's an amplitude to long division, as it opens Chinese take-out box by paper box, inside every folded cookie a new fortune. And I never fail to be surprised by the gift of an odd remainder, footloose at the end: forty-seven divided by eleven equals four,     with three remaining. Three boys beyond their mothers' call, two Italians off to the sea, one sock that isn't anywhere you look. - Mary Cornish Journal prompts: Write about numbers. Which numbers are important to you? What kinds of things to do you count, or save? What have you added to your life lately? What could you subtract? Write a poem using these lines as a structure: I like the generosity of_____________ I like the domesticity of____________ There's an amplitude to____________ I never fail to be surprised by____________

The Poems of the Month are copyrighted in the names of the individual authors, and are reproduced here for educational and therapeutic purposes.

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