Poets United Midweek Motif ~ Safety

“The ache for home lives in all of us. The safe place where 
we can go as we are and not be questioned.”
― Maya Angelou, All God's Children . . .

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 “Would you give up the craft of your hands, and the passion of your heart, and the hunger of your mind, to buy safety?”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Farthest Shore 

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“When we are taught that safety lies always with sameness, then difference, of any kind, will appear as a threat”

― bell hooks 

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Midweek Motif ~ Safety

Do we have or offer safety?  A reasonable amount of safety? Or maybe a"feeling of safety"?

Mostly, I live as if I have safety, spinning an atmosphere of safety around me, inviting others in. 

Your Challenge: In a new poem, give us an experience of safety or lack of safety or a change from one to the other. 

Safety fence on side of footpath, Abingworth, photo by Dave Spicer

 Persephone, Falling

Rita Dove - 1952-

One narcissus among the ordinary beautiful

flowers, one unlike all the others!  She pulled,

stooped to pull harder—

when, sprung out of the earth

on his glittering terrible

carriage, he claimed his due.

It is finished.  No one heard her.

No one!  She had strayed from the herd.

(Remember: go straight to school.

This is important, stop fooling around!

Don't answer to strangers.  Stick

with your playmates.  Keep your eyes down.)

This is how easily the pit

opens.  This is how one foot sinks into the ground.

"Out of the rolling ocean the crowd"

By Walt Whitman

Out of the rolling ocean the crowd came a drop gently to me,

Whispering, I love you, before long I die,

I have travell’d a long way merely to look on you to touch you,

For I could not die till I once look’d on you,

For I fear’d I might afterward lose you.

Now we have met, we have look’d, we are safe,

Return in peace to the ocean my love,

I too am part of that ocean, my love, we are not so much separated,

Behold the great rondure, the cohesion of all, how perfect!

But as for me, for you, the irresistible sea is to separate us,

As for an hour carrying us diverse, yet cannot carry us diverse forever;

Be not impatient – a little space – know you I salute the air, the ocean and the land,

Every day at sundown for your dear sake, my love.

"Fern Hill" by Dylan Thomas

Yom Kippur 1984

By Adrienne Rich

 

           I drew solitude over me, on the long shore.
                                        —Robinson Jeffers, “Prelude”

          For whoever does not afflict his soul through this day, shall be
          cut off from his people.
                                                                           —Leviticus 23:29

What is a Jew in solitude?

What would it mean not to feel lonely or afraid

far from your own or those you have called your own?

What is a woman in solitude:   a queer woman or man?

In the empty street, on the empty beach, in the desert

what in this world as it is can solitude mean?

The glassy, concrete octagon suspended from the cliffs

with its electric gate, its perfected privacy

is not what I mean

the pick-up with a gun parked at a turn-out in Utah or the Golan Heights

is not what I mean

the poet’s tower facing the western ocean, acres of forest planted to the east, the woman reading in the cabin, her attack dog suddenly risen

is not what I mean

Three thousand miles from what I once called home

I open a book searching for some lines I remember

about flowers, something to bind me to this coast as lilacs in the dooryard once

bound me back there—yes, lupines on a burnt mountainside,

something that bloomed and faded and was written down

in the poet’s book, forever:

Opening the poet’s book

I find the hatred in the poet’s heart: . . . the hateful-eyed

and human-bodied are all about me: you that love multitude may have them

Robinson Jeffers, multitude

is the blur flung by distinct forms against these landward valleys

and the farms that run down to the sea; the lupines

are multitude, and the torched poppies, the grey Pacific unrolling its scrolls of surf,

and the separate persons, stooped

over sewing machines in denim dust, bent under the shattering skies of harvest

who sleep by shifts in never-empty beds have their various dreams

Hands that pick, pack, steam, stitch, strip, stuff, shell, scrape, scour, belong to a brain like no other

Must I argue the love of multitude in the blur or defend

a solitude of barbed-wire and searchlights, the survivalist’s final solution, have I a choice?
. . . . 

(Read the rest HERE.)

🧷🧷🧷

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Next week, Sumana's prompt will be "Televised."