Poets United Midweek Motif ~ Bittersweet

True Bittersweet: Solanum dulcamara, photo by Sten Porse

“Happiness. Simple as a glass of chocolate or tortuous as the heart. 
Bitter. Sweet. Alive.” 

― Joanne Harris, Chocolat

“Our sweetest songs are those of saddest thought.” 

― Percy Bysshe Shelley, The Complete Poems

“Something of vengeance I had tasted for the first time; as aromatic wine it seemed, on swallowing, warm and racy: its after-flavour, metallic and corroding, gave me a sensation as if I had been poisoned.” 

― Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre

From The Spruce: American Bittersweet Plants vs. Invasive Oriental Vines 

By DAVID BEAULIEU, Updated 10/17/17  

(Very Interesting Reading about 3 types of bittersweet!)

Midweek Motif ~ Bittersweet

I met the beautiful bittersweet in shades of orange on an oak tree while on a walk with my grandmother.  I gasped!   She said (perhaps erroneously), that it was a parasite, living on the life-blood of another.  I found the word parasite to be negative, and wondered at how something so pretty could have an ugly side.  Well, there you have it (! ) both noun and adjective: Bittersweet.  

Your Challenge: Write a brand new poem with a bittersweet mood and theme.  

Celastrus orbiculatus
Oriental Bittersweet

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Consciousness

BY JOANIE MACKOWSKI

How it is fickle, leaving one alone to wander

the halls of the skull with the fluorescents

softly flickering. It rests on the head

like a bird nest, woven of twigs and tinsel

and awkward as soon as one stops to look.

That pile of fallen leaves drifting from

the brain to the fingertip burned on the stove, 

to the grooves in that man’s voice 

as he coos to his dog, blowing into the leaves 

of books with moonlit opossums

and Chevrolets easing down the roads 

of one’s bones. And now it plucks a single 

tulip from the pixelated blizzard: yet 

itself is a swarm, a pulse with no

indigenous form, the brain’s lunar halo. 

Our compacted galaxy, its constellations 

trembling like flies caught in a spider web, 

until we die, and then the flies

buzz away—while another accidental 

coherence counts to three to pass the time 

or notes the berries on the bittersweet vine

strewn in the spruces, red pebbles dropped

in the brain’s gray pool. How it folds itself 

like a map to fit in a pocket, how it unfolds 

a fraying map from the pocket of the day.

Source: Poetry (February 2012) and the Poetry Foundation
  (Posted with the poet's permission.)

Buried Love

by Sara Teasdale

I have come to bury Love
 Beneath a tree,
In the forest tall and black
 Where none can see.

I shall put no flowers at his head,
 Nor stone at his feet,
For the mouth I loved so much
 Was bittersweet.

I shall go no more to his grave,
 For the woods are cold.
I shall gather as much of joy
 As my hands can hold.

I shall stay all day in the sun
 Where the wide winds blow, --
But oh, I shall cry at night
 When none will know.

Bittersweet - Jalaluddin Rumi Poem read by Madonna - Lyrics

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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 Vanity / Narcissus. )