Everything I Learned about Magic

Day 26: One Month of Magic

A few years ago, my friend asked me to come with her to a workshop—it was being led by her friend, a poet who got an MFA at Iowa. While I expected to dive into academic craft and poetic strategy, the teacher wanted to talk about intuition and higher energies. She was currently studying to be a shaman and everything she shared seemed routed in the divine. 

Photo by Marc-Olivier Jodoin on Unsplash

The workshop was not my usual PowerPoint and examples poems (we all have our own vibe). Instead, she gave us a single prompt: start with the line “Everything I learned about magic…” and continue it.

Back then I was an exhausted new mother, whose own mother had just died a month before. I didn’t want to write about magic, I wanted to write about grief. 

For thirty minutes I wrote and wrote. I had come so prepared to talk about all that I had lost but by the end of the poem I saw that everything had worked out. I wished my mom was still alive, but by the end of the poem, I had remembered my own strength. 

Read “Everything I Learned about Magic” by me below. 

Everything I Learned about Magic 

Kelly Grace Thomas

I learned by not expecting answers. How at the end 

of the day, elbows deep in dish soap, my husband, 

returns, work on his breath, grabs my waist, breaths 

a hot I love you into my neck. I don’t question 

the way we stay astonished with one another, a spell 

I cast and don’t cast. 

Like the wonder of my daughter’s gummy smile. One day 

the first tooth will show, a whitecapped mountain in the distance. 

She will inherit the world and its countless sharp. We found 

one another in a sea of chances. Practice soft together.

I wonder at her Buddha's belly, tell her to always let it 

loose, the double chin, the milk drool, as she giggles 

over her kingdom. 

How in her, I witnessed the magic of my mother’s two last years, 

how at 68 a woman can become a new version of herself: move 

cross-country to hold her children close, find freedom 

in the golden curve of coastline. Inherit the slow light 

of backyard conversation. After 20 years apart, nine months 

into the dream, the diagnosis came. 

How even as Stage Four spread throughout her, 

her eyes, voice, resolve, clear as a glaciers, no weight 

or worry in her laugh. How four months before she died, 

she became a grandmother, her last and final wish. 

Holding my daughter, my mother used to say, 

Im scared she won’t remember me could feel her own lullaby 

slipping out of the room. How I begged the biology 

the cells the chemo to give us enough sunrises 

for the memories to stick. 

I’ll never know how my mom kept her magic: a single mom, 

whose husband left. She, always convinced things were better 

than they were, as long as we don’t all fall apart at once, 

she’d say. Stress is a choice, she’d say, so is joy. 

Here comes the sun, she’d say. I ignore past tense. 

Spend my days speaking her here. And she is.

She is the noon April sun. She is the wind tipping the sail.

She is the single chord of a Beatles song. She is the loudness 

of monarchs outside my window, how they play hide 

and go seek with the hummingbirds, who have built a nest 

in our bistro lights. The wonder of a small beak poking into 

a new world. I let the tears out of my castle, lower 

myself like bridge to moat. 

I cannot tell you that magic means the same in every language 

but I can recall the moment. I forgave my life, committed 

to laughter, the kicking and coffee, let loose of the anxiety 

and the unlit fires. So snuggle each feeling until it speaks to 

you. Lie in your story like an unmade bed. Whatever you do, don’t ask 

how we did any of it. Instead, just let the pink wonder of today 

unfold like a map you wrote and wrote, then never used again. 

I can’t tell you how I got here, only that magic is a fast-moving car.

Look for her, among the empty bottles and the too-tight pants. 

Look for her as you cry behind steering wheels

until one day you don’t. 

This month, I hope you have been reminded of your power and strength. I hope that you have learned something about magic—others and your own.

Prompt: Write something where the first line begins “Everything I learned about magic….” Then go from there. That’s it. Pretty simple. See where the magic takes you. 

One Month of Magic guidelines: 

For the month of July, post a daily prompt to inspire magical thinking. 

1. Read and respond to the prompt by writing for seven, seventeen, or seventy-seven minutes—whatever you like—exploring what it stirs inside you. That’s it. It’s easy and breezy and designed to make you consider things deeper to search for sparkle. 

2. After you write, post your response in the comments section of that day's post (only available to paid subscribers). Offer feedback to at least two people. Celebrate and clarify what is magical about one another’s work. How it deepened your own awareness and awe. 

3. Posts will NOT be emailed—don’t want to spam people—but they will be posted on chat. So, if you want a daily magical ping, turn the chat feature and notifications on. You can find how in your settings.