Poets United Midweek Motif ~ Wilderness

   

   “Wilderness is not a luxury but a necessity of the human spirit.”— Edward Abbey

Christ in the Wilderness by Ivan Kramskoi

“To plunder, to slaughter, to steal, these things they misname empire; and where they make a wilderness, they call it peace.”— Tacitus

Midweek Motif ~ Wilderness

This week we are away from our frenzied, civilized lives into the wilderness, places untrammeled by man: in reality or in imagination (like hikes with friends or solitary day trips).

You might also discover a bit of wilderness, traces of the wild in the cities / in people too.

Is wilderness a place? Is it an instinct? Is it an idea?

How does wilderness make you feel?

Share some wilderness moments in your poems today:

A Voice In The Wilderness

by Audrey Hepburn

            

I roamed the streets of Rome,
It felt like home,
People told me to stay,
But I said no 'This is my Roman Holiday',

I was a flower seller, poor and dirty,
but sang like a canary,
Henry Higgins said maybe,
And called me his Fair Lady.

I was being chased,
Life was a maze,
Four men made it a craze,
It was more like a game of charades. 

Wilderness

by Carl Sandburg

There is a wolf in me . . . fangs pointed for tearing gashes . . . a red tongue for raw meat . . . and the hot lapping of blood—I keep this wolf because the wilderness gave it to me and the wilderness will not let it go.    

               

There is a fox in me . . . a silver-gray fox . . . I sniff and guess . . . I pick things out of the wind and air . . . I nose in the dark night and take sleepers and eat them and hide the feathers . . . I circle and loop and double-cross.

There is a hog in me . . . a snout and a belly . . . a machinery for eating and grunting . . . a machinery for sleeping satisfied in the sun—I got this too from the wilderness and the wilderness will not let it go.

There is a fish in me . . . I know I came from salt-blue water-gates . . . I scurried with shoals of herring . . . I blew waterspouts with porpoises . . . before land was . . . before the water went down . . . before Noah . . . before the first chapter of Genesis.

There is a baboon in me . . . clambering-clawed . . . dog-faced . . . yawping a galoot’s hunger . . . hairy under the armpits . . . here are the hawk-eyed hankering men . . . here are the blonde and blue-eyed women . . . here they hide curled asleep waiting . . . ready to snarl and kill . . . ready to sing and give milk . . . waiting—I keep the baboon because the wilderness says so.

There is an eagle in me and a mockingbird . . . and the eagle flies among the Rocky Mountains of my dreams and fights among the Sierra crags of what I want . . . and the mockingbird warbles in the early forenoon before the dew is gone, warbles in the underbrush of my Chattanoogas of hope, gushes over the blue Ozark foothills of my wishes—And I got the eagle and the mockingbird from the wilderness.

O, I got a zoo, I got a menagerie, inside my ribs, under my bony head, under my red-valve heart—and I got something else: it is a man-child heart, a woman-child heart: it is a father and mother and lover: it came from God-Knows-Where: it is going to God-Knows-Where—For I am the keeper of the zoo: I say yes and no: I sing and kill and work: I am a pal of the world: I came from the wilderness.

 Anecdote of the Jar

by Wallace Stevens

I placed a jar in Tennessee,

And round it was, upon a hill.

It made the slovenly wilderness

Surround that hill.

The wilderness rose up to it,

And sprawled around, no longer wild.

The jar was round upon the ground

And tall and of a port in air.

It took dominion everywhere.

The jar was gray and bare.

It did not give of bird or bush,

Like nothing else in Tennessee.

    Please share your new poem using Mr. Linky below and visit others in the spirit of the community—

                (Next week Susan’s Midweek Motif will be ~ "a bundle of contradictions" or Anne Frank's last letter)