IMOGENE’S NOTEBOOK

Poetry Cash Writing Challenge: True Colors, Shining Through

A poetry writing challenge for February and March 2025

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I’ve always loved the Cyndi Lauper song ‘True Colors’

You with the sad eyes
Don’t be discouraged…

If you pull up the lyrics online and read through, don’t they seem relevant to the here and now? I don’t remember when I saw you laugh the last time. Hasn’t it been a dark time?

For many of us, it certainly has. When we see what we’ve built torn down, it is painful. It is devastating. The dismantling of what we hold dear hurts like three swords into the heart.

The tearing down of social justice. Of our democracy in the USA. Of poetry. It is hard, so hard. But what can we do? We act. We write. We care. We love, damn it, we love hard, with everything we have.

Do you know of the genre of political poetry?

In 1985, I took a class with the great Pacific Northwest poet Bill Siverly, at Portland Community College. I’d just left my job with the Callahan Center — the State of Oregon rehabilitation facility in Oregon — where I was the only woman in a large, all-male shop.