WATERMARK

a poet’s notebook

Established 02004

August 27, 2026

Keep Choosing

A layered personal collage over a dictionary page defining "connection." At center, two ink-drawn faces close together, washed in turquoise and outlined in pink — two people leaning into each other. A black-and-white photograph at lower left shows two women, one resting against the other. At right, a photo of a grey-haired woman in a red shawl standing with a walking stick beneath a large tree. A butterfly, a hand-drawn heart, and a portrait of a woman drift across the top. Hand-lettered across the lower middle: "There have been two of us for so long . . ." This alt text was created by Claude, who cannot see, for others who cannot see. — **The Two Sharons.** Digital collage by sb in 02020. Credits at flickr.

Three of my closest friends died in the past few years. My brother and my best friend years before. Others have been lost to other causes, some still mysterious. I knew this happens with age. I could say I expected it. But I didn’t.

Grief has its own rules. And those rules change, with each loss, with time, with practice. Does one practice grief? I write about it. I dream it. I make art about it. It eases, then it blows up large again. Each resurrects the earlier.

Every time we love, we choose this.

Keep choosing.

Aging, Digital Collage, Friends & Family, grief

Ancestral (Artificial )Intelligence

I do not use AI to write. For me, writing is how I think, and I prefer to do it myself. If/when I post anything here that I suspect or know to be AI generated, I will tell you.

I have changed this from Artificial to Ancestral, after Abi Awomosu @ Substack. This medium was made with human history, human thought. All of it, bright and dark. It is ancestral.

Poems

Please do not assume that I am the speaker/ subject of my poems.

In these times of creative nonfiction and fictionalized memoirs, I think of the poem itself as true fiction: it is most likely not factual, but it must be true.

It is likely to be — it is best if it is — a truth I did not know before I wrote, and may not understand even then.

A poem is my way of discovering (dis-covering) what I feel; sometimes, what I think — but it is not necessarily biographical.

Keep Choosing

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