Poets United Midweek Motif ~ Invisibility

“It is only shallow people who do not judge by appearances. 

The true mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible.” 
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

“All the being and the doing, expansive, glittering, vocal, evaporated; and one shrunk, with a sense of solemnity, to being oneself, a wedge-shaped core of darkness, something invisible to others.” 

― Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse

“I don't know why people are so keen to put the details
of their private life in public; they forget 
that invisibility is a superpower.” 

― Banksy

“Through you we learn to be invisible, through you inaudible; 
and hence we can hold the enemy's fate in our hands.” 

― Sun Tzu, The Art of War

“ I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me. Like the bodiless heads you see sometimes in a circus sideshow, it is as though I have been surrounded by mirrors of hard, distorting glass. When they approach me they see only my surroundings, themselves, or figments of their imagination- indeed, everything and anything except me.” 

― Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man

“The people stared through her as though she were invisible until she thought she was, and walked more easily then, just a cloud reflected in a stream.” 

― Louise Erdrich

Midweek Motif ~ Invisibility

(The motif you suggested.)

Your Challenge:    [             ] 

in a new poem, please.

Palladiums

by Carl Sandburg

IN the newspaper office—who are the spooks?
Who wears the mythic coat invisible?

Who pussyfoots from desk to desk
 with a speaking forefinger?
Who gumshoes amid the copy paper
 with a whispering thumb?

Speak softly—the sacred cows may hear.

Speak easy—the sacred cows must be fed.

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Excerpt from Ghazal: America the Beautiful


by Alicia Ostriker, 1937


Do you remember our earnestness our sincerity
in first grade when we learned to sing America


The Beautiful along with the Star-Spangled Banner
and say the Pledge of Allegiance to America


We put our hands over our first grade hearts
we felt proud to be citizens of America


I said One Nation Invisible until corrected
maybe I was right about America

School days school days dear old Golden Rule Days
when we learned how to behave in America

What to wear, how to smoke, how to despise our parents
who didn’t understand us or America


Only later learning the Banner and the Beautiful
live on opposite sides of the street in America

. . . . 
(Read the rest HERE. From Poems for After the Election by Poets.org.)
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Excerpt from All the Women Caught in Flaring Light


Related Poem Content Details


BY MINNIE BRUCE PRATT





1 



Imagine a big room of women doing anything, 

playing cards, having a meeting, the rattle 

of paper or coffee cups or chairs pushed back, 

the loud and quiet murmur of their voices, 

women leaning their heads together. If we 

leaned in at the door and I said, Those women 

are mothers, you wouldn’t be surprised, except 

at me for pointing out the obvious fact. 



Women are mothers, aren’t they? So obvious. 



Say we walked around to 8th or 11th Street 

to drop in on a roomful of women, smiling, intense, 

playing pool, the green baize like moss. One 

lights another’s cigarette, oblique glance. 

Others dance by twos under twirling silver moons 

that rain light down in glittering drops. 

If I said in your ear, through metallic guitars, 

These women are mothers, you wouldn’t believe me, 

would you? Not really, not even if you had come 

to be one of the women in that room. You’d say: 

Well, maybe, one or two, a few. It’s what we say. 



Here, we hardly call our children’s names out loud. 

We’ve lost them once, or fear we may. We’re careful 

what we say. In the clanging silence, pain falls 

on our hearts, year in and out, like water cutting 

a groove in stone, seeking a channel, a way out, 

pain running like water through the glittering room. 





2 



I often think of a poem as a door that opens 

into a room where I want to go. But to go in 




here is to enter where my own suffering exists

. . . . 
(Read the rest HERE.)








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Please share your new poem using Mr. Linky below and visit others 
in the spirit of the community.  AND: please put a link to this prompt with your poem.  (Next week Sumana's Midweek Motif will be ~ Hyperbole ~ Stretch the Truth)