Happy Sunday…and Happy Holidays…’tis the season and all that jazz. This week we celebrated the first of many annual traditions and rituals as we gather for coma-inducing feasts, parades and dog shows, football, shopping sprees at the crack of dawn, twinkling lights, sappy holiday movie binges, and for the faithful, it is a time to celebrate spiritual blessings of the season.

It can be an intensely emotional time for many of us as we reconcile memories with the present day realities of our dysfunctional families, but it is also a time of hope and blessings and peace if we are open to it, a time to embrace what truly matters. This is at the top of my wish list for all of us. Love, hope, happiness and peace. Everything else is just stuff.

Shi Sai Sunday’s Week in ReVerse – 27 November 2016

to live and breathe a life
of purest deep love
every writer knows…
hell if I know
if one dares to dream
from the belly of Gaia
she clings to mem’ries of spring
I liberated myself from this annual masochistic ritual
the internet is full
the latest, greatest new things
they will convince you

~kat

The Shi Sai (formerly known as a ReVerse) is a new form I came up with during Poetry Month in April 2016. I’ve actually been writing shu sai for years but was inspired to give it a proper name. It is a poem created by taking one line of verse from several poems of an author’s own collection. The shi sai is done as a review of a series or collection of poems and therefore, each line should flow in chronological order of the dates the poems were written (from oldest to new). The lines chosen should be the author’s favorite from each poem. This form works best if the author resists the temptation to read the full new poem before all the verses have been added. (It helps one to resist the impulse to change a line to make it “fit”.