Poets United Midweek Motif ~ Writing Prose

“For me a page of good prose is where one hears the rain. A page of good prose is when one hears the noise of battle.... A page of good prose seems to me the most serious dialogue that well-informed and intelligent men and women carry on today in their endeavor to make sure that the fires of this planet burn peaceably.” 

― John Cheever

Allegory of Rhetoric by Artemisia Lomi Gentileschi  (@1650)

“A good sentence in prose should be like a good line in poetry, unchangeable, as rhythmic, as sonorous.” ― Gustave Flaubert

“The characters in my novels are my own unrealised possibilities. That is why I am equally fond of them all and equally horrified by them. Each one has crossed a border that I myself have circumvented.” ― Milan Kundera

 "There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you." ―Zora Neale Hurston

 "Good fiction creates empathy. A novel takes you somewhere and asks you to look through the eyes of another person, to live another life." ―Barbara Kingsolver

"God of Literature Pointing the Dipper."

Poets United ~ Writing Prose

Poets United has a new prompt on the first Sunday of every month, "Telling Tales with Magaly Guerrero: a Pantry of Prose."  So let's write a poem about the tales we can tell in prose and how it is to write them.

Your challenge is to do one or more of these in a new poem: 

1. describe prose vs. poetry
2. use the prose element of dialogue fitting the character who speaks it (within your poem)
3. praise prose to the utmost 
4. show us a prose writer at work

Literature saving the past from destruction by Time, 
in the form of an old angel with a scythe. Etching by L. du Guernier.

 

They shut me up in Prose – (445)

BY EMILY DICKINSON

They shut me up in Prose –

As when a little Girl

They put me in the Closet –

Because they liked me “still”   –

Still! Could themself have peeped –

And seen my Brain – go round –

They might as wise have lodged a Bird

For Treason – in the Pound –

Himself has but to will

And easy as a Star

Look down upon Captivity –

And laugh – No more have I –

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Poem by Aleksandr Kushner

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Ordinary Miracle - by Barbara Kingsolver

I have mourned lost days
When I accomplished nothing of importance.
But not lately.
Lately under the lunar tide
Of a woman's ocean, I work
My own sea-change:
Turning grains of sand to human eyes.
I daydream after breakfast
While the spirit of egg and toast
Knits together a length of bone
As fine as a wheatstalk.
Later, as I postpone weeding the garden
I will make two hands
That may tend a hundred gardens.

I need ten full moons exactly
For keeping the animal promise.
I offer myself up: unsaintly, but
Transmuted anyway
By the most ordinary miracle.
I am nothing in this world beyond the things one woman does.
But here are eyes that once were pearls.
And here is a second chance where there was none.

 

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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 ~

 Almond Blossoms, by Vincent Van Gogh)

Poets United Midweek Motif ~ Independence

(Tim Hall Cultura Getty Images)

“Independence is a complex word in a foreign tongue.
 To resist occupation, whether you're a nation or merely a woman, you must understand the language of your enemy. Conquest and liberation and democracy and divorce are words that mean squat, basically, when you have hungry children and clothes to get out on the line and it looks like rain.” 

― Barbara Kingsolver

“From birds she learned how to sing; from cats she learned 
a form of dangerous independence.” 

― Salman Rushdie

It is very nearly impossible... to become an educated person in a country 

so distrustful of the independent mind. 

― James A. Baldwin

source

Midweek Motif ~ 
Independence

Many of our countries have holidays that celebrate gaining independence from foreign rule, and many of us also have rites--formal and informal--related to gaining independence.  Some of these are about our countries and ~ more importantly ~ some of these are about us as individuals and members of groups.   

What is your experience of independence? 

How might you describe independence to someone who has never encountered it?

How are your beliefs about independence reflected in how you see nature?  

Or vice versa: How is your view of nature reflected in your beliefs about independence?

Your Challenge: Let your new poem answer one of the four questions above.

Johnny Cash - As Long As the Grass Shall Grow

Excerpt from "The Declaration of Independence" 

by ― Thomas Jefferson

We hold these truths to be self-evident:

that all men are created equal,

that they are endowed by their Creator

with certain unalienable rights,

that among these are life, liberty

and the pursuit of happiness.

Sympathy

Related Poem Content Details

BY PAUL LAURENCE DUNBAR

I know what the caged bird feels, alas!

    When the sun is bright on the upland slopes;

When the wind stirs soft through the springing grass,

And the river flows like a stream of glass;

    When the first bird sings and the first bud opes,

And the faint perfume from its chalice steals—

I know what the caged bird feels! 

I know why the caged bird beats his wing 

    Till its blood is red on the cruel bars;   

For he must fly back to his perch and cling   

When he fain would be on the bough a-swing; 

    And a pain still throbs in the old, old scars   

And they pulse again with a keener sting— 

I know why he beats his wing! 

I know why the caged bird sings, ah me, 

    When his wing is bruised and his bosom sore,— 

When he beats his bars and he would be free; 

It is not a carol of joy or glee, 

    But a prayer that he sends from his heart’s deep core,   

But a plea, that upward to Heaven he flings— 

I know why the caged bird sings!

mud mothers

Related Poem Content Details

BY LENELLE MOÏSE

the children of haiti

are not mythological

. . . . 

we are a living dead example

of what happens to warriors who

in lieu of fighting for white men's countries

dare to fight

for their own lives

during carnival

we could care less

about our bloated empty bellies

where there are voices

we are dancing

where there is vodou

we are horses

where there are drums

we are possessed

with joy and stubborn jamboree

but   . . . .

(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—

(Next week Sumana's Midweek Motif will be ~ Movement.)