Heaven and the Night Tide – Poem and Content for #WALKMYWORLD

TL;DR Version: In this sixth look back into my past for the #WALKMYWORLD project, I continue to experiment with writing poetry, re-play my work with #52pics, and post to Poetry Genius.

This post is my submission for week six, learning event six, of the #WALKMYWORLD project. For this week I’m continuing to look back into my identity and “document my world.” Once again, this walk in my world is a somewhat private journey that I’m choosing to make publicly.

This week we’re studying the poem The Seventh Night by Robert Hass. In thinking about the annotations and general feedback on the poem by others, I took a different angle on what Hass was trying to tell us. I responding to The Seventh Night, I saw parallels to Aedh Wishes for the Clothes of Heaven. I should indicate that this is primarily because of my own experiences, and the way that the Yeats piece resonates with me.

This also made me think of a prior social media experiment that I conducted about three years ago. I challenged myself to share a picture per week, for 52 weeks in a year. These pics I shared on Twitter using the hashtag #52pics. Since several people have been asking about the genesis of the #WALKMYWORLD project, I can saw that this earlier experience with #52pics guided my thinking. Serendipitously, in the #52pics experiment, we found out that we were pregnant. As a result, the only people that knew that we were pregnant were my Twitter followers. That is to say…no one. 🙂

For week six of the #WALKMYWORLD project I wrote a poem using the inspiration of my work with #52pics, The Seventh Night by Robert Hass, and Aedh Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven by W. B. Yeats. The poem, Heaven and the Night Tide is available here on PoetryGenius.

The video from #52pics is embedded below. Please keep in mind, there is a fair amount of baby-bump photos in the video. If that’s not your “cup of tea”…feel free to skip.

There is one more teaching moment in this work. This video was made and shared on YouTube about three years ago. Because I added the Jack Johnson track I received a “take down notice” in Germany. At first, it was blocked on mobile devices here in the U.S. Now, YouTube monetizes my inclusion of the song by placing ads on it. I was going to revise the video to take out the offending Jack Johnson clip, but then decided to leave it alone as a lesson of copyright and policy.