Poets United Midweek Motif ~ Vision

“Every creator painfully experiences the chasm between his inner vision and its ultimate expression. The chasm is never completely bridged. ” 
― Isaac Bashevis Singer

 "Whatever you can do or dream you can, begin it. 
Boldness has genius, and magic and power in it." -- Goethe

"If you want to build a ship, don't herd people together to collect wood and don't assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea." -- Antoine de Saint-Exupery

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Midweek Motif ~ Vision

Happy New Year!

It's good to see you back here 

at the beginning of 2017.  

Your Challenge: Share a vision of the future in a new poem.

Visions · Stevie Wonder · Dan Barbiero · Austin Godsey

Excerpt from Benjamin Banneker Helps to Build a City

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BY JAY WRIGHT

In a morning coat, 

hands locked behind your back, 

you walk gravely along the lines in your head. 

These others stand with you, 

squinting the city into place, 

yet cannot see what you see, 

what you would see 

—a vision of these paths, 

laid out like a star, 

or like a body, 

the seed vibrating within itself, 

breaking into the open, 

dancing up to stop at the end of the universe. 

I say your vision goes as far as this, 

the egg of the world, 

where everything remains, and moves, 

holding what is most against it against itself, 

moving, as though it knew its end, against death. 

. . . . 

(Read the rest HERE at the Poetry Foundation.)

Excerpt from Howl

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BY ALLEN GINSBERG

For Carl Solomon

. . . . 

II

What sphinx of cement and aluminum bashed open their skulls and ate up their brains and imagination?

Moloch! Solitude! Filth! Ugliness! Ashcans and unobtainable dollars! Children screaming under the stairways! Boys sobbing in armies! Old men weeping in the parks!

Moloch! Moloch! Nightmare of Moloch! Moloch the loveless! Mental Moloch! Moloch the heavy judger of men!

Moloch the incomprehensible prison! Moloch the crossbone soulless jailhouse and Congress of sorrows! Moloch whose buildings are judgment! Moloch the vast stone of war! Moloch the stunned governments!

Moloch whose mind is pure machinery! Moloch whose blood is running money! Moloch whose fingers are ten armies! Moloch whose breast is a cannibal dynamo! Moloch whose ear is a smoking tomb!

Moloch whose eyes are a thousand blind windows! Moloch whose skyscrapers stand in the long streets like endless Jehovahs! Moloch whose factories dream and croak in the fog! Moloch whose smoke-stacks and antennae crown the cities!

Moloch whose love is endless oil and stone! Moloch whose soul is electricity and banks! Moloch whose poverty is the specter of genius! Moloch whose fate is a cloud of sexless hydrogen! Moloch whose name is the Mind!

Moloch in whom I sit lonely! Moloch in whom I dream Angels! Crazy in Moloch! Cocksucker in Moloch! Lacklove and manless in Moloch!

Moloch who entered my soul early! Moloch in whom I am a consciousness without a body! Moloch who frightened me out of my natural ecstasy! Moloch whom I abandon! Wake up in Moloch! Light streaming out of the sky!

Moloch! Moloch! Robot apartments! invisible suburbs! skeleton treasuries! blind capitals! demonic industries! spectral nations! invincible madhouses! granite cocks! monstrous bombs!

They broke their backs lifting Moloch to Heaven! Pavements, trees, radios, tons! lifting the city to Heaven which exists and is everywhere about us!

Visions! omens! hallucinations! miracles! ecstasies! gone down the American river!

Dreams! adorations! illuminations! religions! the whole boatload of sensitive bullshit!

Breakthroughs! over the river! flips and crucifixions! gone down the flood! Highs! Epiphanies! Despairs! Ten years’ animal screams and suicides! Minds! New loves! Mad generation! down on the rocks of Time!

Real holy laughter in the river! They saw it all! the wild eyes! the holy yells! They bade farewell! They jumped off the roof! to solitude! waving! carrying flowers! Down to the river! into the street!

. . . . 

(Read the rest HERE at the Poetry Foundation.)

Excerpt from Report to Crazy Horse

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BY WILLIAM E. STAFFORD

All the Sioux were defeated. Our clan   

got poor, but a few got richer. 

They fought two wars. I did not 

take part. No one remembers your vision   

or even your real name. Now   

the children go to town and like   

loud music. I married a Christian. 

Crazy Horse, it is not fair 

to hide a new vision from you. 

In our schools we are learning 

to take aim when we talk, and we have   

found out our enemies. They shift when   

words do; they even change and hide   

in every person. A teacher here says   

hurt or scorned people are places   

where real enemies hide. He says   

we should not hurt or scorn anyone,   

but help them. And I will tell you   

in a brave way, the way Crazy Horse   

talked: that teacher is right. 

I will tell you a strange thing: 

at the rodeo, close to the grandstand,   

I saw a farm lady scared by a blown   

piece of paper; and at that place   

horses and policemen were no longer   

frightening, but suffering faces were,   

and the hunched-over backs of the old. 

Crazy Horse, tell me if I am right: 

these are the things we thought we were   

doing something about. 

. . . . 

(Read the rest HERE at the Poetry Foundation.)

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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 The Door. )
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