Poets United Midweek Motif ~ Recovery/Healing

"And someday . . .

If the darkness knocks on your door

Remember her, remember me

We will be running as we have before

Running for answers, running for more"


~ Melissa Etheridge

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Midweek Motif ~ 

Recovery/Healing

It will surprise no one that my first motif after back surgery is Recovery.  My lumbar spine is now fused—four of the five vertebrae—and the pain in my legs is GONE!   Thank you, thank you for all your good wishes!  

I am particularly grateful to poet Michael Ryan who has given me permission to use his amazing poem "A Thank-You Note."

Life is precious.

I think about how precious when I look at the news of wars, refugees and broken environments; when I see marvelous new inventions and creative ideas about interacting with all living things; when friends heal into more life or sometimes into death.

Your Challenge is to write a poem 

that heals or has a motif of recovery. 

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A Thank-You Note




BY MICHAEL RYAN

                                                                                                          For John Skoyles



My daughter made drawings with the pens you sent,

line drawings that suggest the things they represent,

different from any drawings she — at ten — had done,

closer to real art, implying what the mind fills in.

For her mother she made a flower fragile on its stem;

for me, a lion, calm, contained, but not a handsome one.

She drew a lion for me once before, on a get-well card,

and wrote I must be brave even when it’s hard.



Such love is healing — as you know, my friend,

especially when it comes unbidden from our children

despite the flaws they see so vividly in us.

Who can love you as your child does?

Your son so ill, the brutal chemo, his looming loss

owning you now — yet you would be this generous

to think of my child. With the pens you sent

she has made I hope a healing instrument.








(Source: Poetry (July/August 2013), used with permission.)





Homework

BY ALLEN GINSBERG




Homage Kenneth Koch

If I were doing my Laundry I’d wash my dirty Iran

I’d throw in my United States, and pour on the Ivory Soap, scrub up Africa, put all the birds and elephants back in the jungle,

I’d wash the Amazon river and clean the oily Carib & Gulf of Mexico,   

Rub that smog off the North Pole, wipe up all the pipelines in Alaska,   

Rub a dub dub for Rocky Flats and Los Alamos, Flush that sparkly Cesium out of Love Canal

Rinse down the Acid Rain over the Parthenon & Sphinx, Drain Sludge out of the 

Mediterranean basin & make it azure again . . . 

(Read the rest HERE at the Poetry Foundation)














Motion Picture Footage From "An Inconvenient Truth"




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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 ~ Teacher, One who Teaches)