Poets United Midweek Motif ~ Animals

A day to celebrate #animals all around the world!
#WorldAnimalDay    #animalwelfare

                    MISSION OF WORLD ANIMAL DAY
Building the celebration of World Animal Day unites the animal welfare movement, mobilising it into a global force to make the world a better place for all animals.  It's celebrated in different ways in every country, irrespective of nationality, religion, faith or political ideology.  

“The greatness of a nation and its moral progress can be judged 

by the way its animals are treated.” 
― Mahatma Gandhi

“The animals of the world exist for their own reasons. They were not made for humans any more than black people were made for white, or women created for men.” 
― Alice Walker

“We have doomed the wolf not for what it is, but for what we deliberately and mistakenly perceive it to be –the mythologized epitome of a savage ruthless killer – which is, in reality, no more than a reflected image of ourself.” 
― Farley Mowat, Never Cry Wolf

Noah's Ark (1846), a painting by Edward Hicks.

Midweek Motif  ~ Animals

What would you speak of--wild ones,

domestic ones, or both?  Move us, dear poets,

in a new poem with images and insights 
pertaining to animal(s).

(Let's leave insects for another time.)

🐻

 Direct Action Everywhere activists , photo by Pax Ahimsa Gethen

The Tyger

BY WILLIAM BLAKE

Tyger Tyger, burning bright, 

In the forests of the night; 

What immortal hand or eye, 

Could frame thy fearful symmetry? 

In what distant deeps or skies. 

Burnt the fire of thine eyes? 

On what wings dare he aspire? 

What the hand, dare seize the fire? 

And what shoulder, & what art, 

Could twist the sinews of thy heart? 

And when thy heart began to beat, 

What dread hand? & what dread feet? 

What the hammer? what the chain, 

In what furnace was thy brain? 

What the anvil? what dread grasp, 

Dare its deadly terrors clasp! 

When the stars threw down their spears 

And water'd heaven with their tears: 

Did he smile his work to see? 

Did he who made the Lamb make thee? 

Tyger Tyger burning bright, 

In the forests of the night: 

What immortal hand or eye, 

Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?

🐱

The cat’s song

BY MARGE PIERCY

Mine, says the cat, putting out his paw of darkness. 

My lover, my friend, my slave, my toy, says 

the cat making on your chest his gesture of drawing 

milk from his mother’s forgotten breasts. 

Let us walk in the woods, says the cat. 

I’ll teach you to read the tabloid of scents, 

to fade into shadow, wait like a trap, to hunt. 

Now I lay this plump warm mouse on your mat. 

You feed me, I try to feed you, we are friends, 

says the cat, although I am more equal than you. 

Can you leap twenty times the height of your body? 

Can you run up and down trees? Jump between roofs? 

Let us rub our bodies together and talk of touch. 

My emotions are pure as salt crystals and as hard. 

My lusts glow like my eyes. I sing to you in the mornings 

walking round and round your bed and into your face. 

Come I will teach you to dance as naturally 

as falling asleep and waking and stretching long, long. 

I speak greed with my paws and fear with my whiskers. 

Envy lashes my tail. Love speaks me entire, a word 

of fur. I will teach you to be still as an egg 

and to slip like the ghost of wind through the grass.

From Mars & Her Children (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1992). 

First appeared in Matrix 28 (Spring 1989). Copyright © 1989, 1992 

by Marge Piercy and Middlemarsh, Inc. 

🐎

She Had Some Horses

      BY JOY HARJO

I. She Had Some Horses

She had some horses.

She had horses who were bodies of sand.

She had horses who were maps drawn of blood.

She had horses who were skins of ocean water.

She had horses who were the blue air of sky.

She had horses who were fur and teeth.

She had horses who were clay and would break.

She had horses who were splintered red cliff.

She had some horses.

She had horses with eyes of trains.

She had horses with full, brown thighs.

She had horses who laughed too much.

She had horses who threw rocks at glass houses.

She had horses who licked razor blades.

She had some horses.

She had horses who danced in their mothers' arms.

She had horses who thought they were the sun and their

bodies shone and burned like stars.

She had horses who waltzed nightly on the moon.

She had horses who were much too shy, and kept quiet

in stalls of their own making.

She had some horses.

She had horses who liked Creek Stomp Dance songs.

She had horses who cried in their beer.

She had horses who spit at male queens who made

them afraid of themselves.

She had horses who said they weren't afraid.

She had horses who lied.

She had horses who told the truth, who were stripped

bare of their tongues.

She had some horses.

She had horses who called themselves, "horse."

She had horses who called themselves, "spirit," and kept

their voices secret and to themselves.

She had horses who had no names.

She had horses who had books of names.

She had some horses.

She had horses who whispered in the dark, who were afraid to speak.

She had horses who screamed out of fear of the silence, who

carried knives to protect themselves from ghosts.

She had horses who waited for destruction.

She had horses who waited for resurrection.

She had some horses.

She had horses who got down on their knees for any saviour.

She had horses who thought their high price had saved them.

She had horses who tried to save her, who climbed in her

bed at night and prayed.

She had some horses.

She had some horses she loved.

She had some horses she hated.

These were the same horses.

. . . . 

(Part one excerpt from a five part poem; read the rest HERE.)

🐦

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

(Next week Sumana’s Midweek Motif will be ~ Autumn.)