My Brother’s Cup
A Journey through Traumatic Witness to a Healing Life
Cyra Sweet Dumitru
Coming Summer 2023
(excerpt from the Foreword)
Dear Reader,
I am honored that you are here, that you are willing to travel this journey of memory, forged into poems and prose. Thank you for being open and curious. Thank you for trusting me as your storyteller.
It is my deepest desire that My Brother’s Cup serves as a healing presence in the world, as an in-depth testimony of the crucial role that writing can play in someone’s recovery from trauma or from bearing first-hand witness to traumatic events. Because of the healing spirit of this book, I want you to be prepared for a disturbing account found in an early chapter.
This is a story about living creatively with memory infused with the sensory details of seeing, hearing, and smelling my eldest brother David’s suicide. The whirlpool of tangled, confused, charged feelings that accompanied such witness. David chose a methodology for ending his life that was not immediately fatal for him, nor painless. It was vivid, terrifying, and messy. It involved fire. It is important that you are not caught unaware of this when you enter the story, especially if you have a history of trauma in your own life. It is important to me that you are informed and take care of yourself as you read . . .
. . . Language, especially stories and poems, have been a source of vitality and connection for me since childhood. I was blessed with parents who read aloud to their children and told invented stories. Their animated voices as they read or told stories stimulated my imagination and inner sight. Created dramatic and hopeful worlds. Wove me into a family circle that I shared with my three brothers. No wonder that I have felt called to write since I was a small child—drawn to write poetry, to keep a journal, and to dream-tend.
Thus, this telling is most about rediscovering my innate wholeness with poetry as a lifelong companion. This book focuses upon the healing of my heart and soul, a journey centered upon learning to trust my instincts, my inner guide, who I came to call Voice. The more that I attended to poems surfacing in me, the more I heard the quiet, luminous voice alive within, one that intends my highest good. The more I felt befriended by and able to align with healing energies.
Voice was present the night of David’s suicide. Voice made a promise to me then, which became fulfilled over the course of many years. Voice is my word for the creative, loving, sacred reality that holds my human existence and the larger world that I know, all together. It encompasses the natural world and the cosmos, as well as the realm of those who have died. Voice often leads me to write poems that have powerful, expansive effects upon me.
In this book, I try to explain how particular poems generated such transformative, healing energy. This fascinates me.
As best I can, I want to understand how these healings, these psychological and spiritual transformations arise and ripple from the word-play, from the sensory specifics, the lyrical lines, rhythms, and metaphorical frameworks of poems. I want to understand as best I can how poetry can serve as medicine, how language can cultivate our wellness, and our recovery from emotional wounds, especially from traumatic experiences.
When Someone Deeply Listens to You
For Children
Marcie Schwartz
coming Summer 2023
Social–Emotional Learning: Read Aloud, ages 4–8 years
How do you feel When Someone Deeply Listens to You? Courageous, empowered, loved?
Fall in love with our adorable children as they explore, through vibrant language and imagery, what this means to them.
Through writing a poem of their own, children are given the opportunity to explore their feelings of what it feels like to be truly listened to. Fun hands-on activities designed to expand language, enhance listening skills, and train intuitive listening complete the book.
The book acts as a catalyst for educators and parents to bring awareness of how we listen to one another. This is a vital skill in creating a safe, trustworthy bridge of communication between adults and children. By teaching the importance of truly listening to one another at a young age, this book will help children grow up with an awareness that listening is an integral part of honest, heartfelt communication. The hope is that this insight will foster understanding and empathy in the way they communicate in all their relationships.