The Day Before Ash Wednesday

Happy Shrove Tuesday!  Happy Mardi Gras!  Last week, when I mentioned to my Tuesday/Thursday classes that we'd be meeting on Mardi Gras, I got blank looks.  I still don't know whether they were blank looks because my students haven't ever heard of Mardi Gras or because they see me as an old lady who can't possibly understand the joys of cheap, plastic beads and buckets of alcoholic drinks.

I do realize that both may be true.

I usually don't have much in the way of plans for the Tuesday before Ash Wednesday.  But tonight, my local Lutheran church is having a pancake supper to raise funds to send the youth to the big Gathering later this year.  And we are planning to go.

I say my local Lutheran church, which means the one around the corner from my Lutheridge house, the one with the quilt group that has become dear to my heart.  I rarely worship there anymore, because I go to my other church, Faith Lutheran in Bristol, Tennessee, where we'll celebrate Ash Wednesday together; they, too, are having a pancake supper tonight.  And I'm still a member of my South Florida church, Trinity Lutheran in Pembroke Pines; they had beignets this past Sunday.

For my three classes today, I'll present three different love poems and have them write a bit.  I decided to go with love poems and not Ash Wednesday poems, and I decided to stay away from traditional love poetry.  Here's what we'll be doing, if you want to read along:

The poem that's closest to a traditional love poem is Leah Furnas' "The Longley-Weds Know."  The one with the biggest Ash Wednesday vibe is Maggie Smith's "Good Bones"--it's a hopeful Ash Wednesday vibe, but an Ash Wednesday vibe nonetheless.  And the poem that is the one that makes me feel a spark of hope in an Ash Wednesday kind of way is Naomi Shihab Nye's "Gate A-4."

I wasn't able to find much poetry with an outright Ash Wednesday theme, apart from T. S. Eliot, whom I'm not going to tackle with first year students.  And I thought about my own--I've got a series of Ash Wednesday poems, but I don't feel like including them.  I've posted some of them here in the past.  Maybe tomorrow I'll unveil a new one.  Maybe today, I'll write a new one.