Oprah & My Garbage

"Nothing that has ever happened to you is wasted"says my aunt Oprah to me

Check out the full poem here – “Oprah & My Garbage”Oooh Cliffhanger!  Is she really my aunt :-)  I wrote this poem as part of a Documentary Poetics class exercise where we had to follow either of 2 models Anne Carson or Francis Ponge.  I picked Anne Carson and particular it was to model her style in her poem, "The Glass Essay" [side bar: I love this poem!!]  where the task was to integrate and build a poem around a quote.  We literally had 5 minutes or less to think of a quote and about another 10-15 minutes to free-hand write our poem.  This poem is a final version of that free-hand exercise."Nothing that has ever happened to you is wasted" is a quote that has resonated with me since the first time I heard it said by Oprah.  Sometimes we do lose sight of this as we're going through the battle and I do question more than often, what is its purpose?  It for me is a lot of things ... but, in the midst this reminds me that I am blessed no matter what.Photo Credit:The picture is an iPhone picture I took from the first night of the Oprah's "Live the Life You Want Tour" in Newark, NJ, September 2014.