Poets United Midweek Motif ~ Awakening

“If the book we are reading doesn't shake us awake like a blow to the head, why bother reading it in the first place?.... A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us." --Franz Kafka in a letter to Oskar Pollak dated January 27, 1904” ― Franz Kafka

My heart in your hands by Louise Docker

 

 If you say to someone who has ears to hear: 

"What you are doing to me is not just," 

you may touch and awaken at its source

 the spirit of attention and love... ~ Simone Weil

“When one realises one is asleep, at that moment one is already half-awake.”

― P.D. Ouspensky

Sculpture of the Buddha meditating under the Bodhi Tree, 800 C.E.

  Midweek Motif ~ Awakening

Awakening is more than waking after sleep, it involves coming to a realization that is personally transforming.  It may be rational, but more often the path is visceral, emotional or spiritual.  

Have you had an awakening?  

Where is one needed?

Take us there in today's poem. 

Frances MacDonald - The Sleeping Princess 1896

The Waking

By Theodore Roethke
 

I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.   

I feel my fate in what I cannot fear.   

I learn by going where I have to go.

We think by feeling. What is there to know?   

I hear my being dance from ear to ear.   

I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.

Of those so close beside me, which are you?   

God bless the Ground!   I shall walk softly there,   

And learn by going where I have to go.

Light takes the Tree; but who can tell us how?   

The lowly worm climbs up a winding stair;   

I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.

Great Nature has another thing to do   

To you and me; so take the lively air,   

And, lovely, learn by going where to go.

This shaking keeps me steady. I should know.   

What falls away is always. And is near.   

I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.   

I learn by going where I have to go.

 

Excerpt from "To Begin With, the Sweet Grass"

by Mary Oliver
  

1.

Will the hungry ox stand in the field and not eat
    of the sweet grass?
Will the owl bite off its own wings?
Will the lark forget to lift its body in the air or
    forget to sing?
Will the rivers run upstream?

Behold, I say—behold
the reliability and the finery and the teachings
    of this gritty earth gift.

2.
Eat bread and understand comfort.
Drink water, and understand delight.
Visit the garden where the scarlet trumpets
    are opening their bodies for the hummingbirds
who are drinking the sweetness, who are
    thrillingly gluttonous.

For one thing leads to another.
Soon you will notice how stones shine underfoot.
Eventually tides will be the only calendar you believe in.

And someone's face, whom you love, will be as a star
both intimate and ultimate,
and you will be both heart-shaken and respectful.

And you will hear the air itself, like a beloved, whisper:
oh, let me, for a while longer, enter the two
beautiful bodies of your lungs.
. . . . 

 
  7.
What I loved in the beginning, I think, was mostly myself.
Never mind that I had to, since somebody had to.
That was many years ago.
Since then I have gone out from my confinements,
   though with difficulty.
I mean the ones that thought to rule my heart.
I cast them out, I put them on the mush pile.
They will be nourishment somehow (everything is nourishment
somehow or another).

And I have become the child of the clouds, and of hope.
I have become the friend of the enemy, whoever that is.
I have become older and, cherishing what I have learned,
I have become younger.

And what do I risk to tell you this, which is all I know?
Love yourself. Then forget it. Then, love the world.
 

(Read the rest HERE 

or in Mary Oliver's book Evidence: Poems, Beacon Press, 2010.)

Waking from Sleep

By Robert Bly
 

Inside the veins there are navies setting forth,

Tiny explosions at the waterlines,

And seagulls weaving in the wind of the salty blood.

It is the morning. The country has slept the whole winter.

Window seats were covered with fur skins, the yard was full

Of stiff dogs, and hands that clumsily held heavy books.

Now we wake, and rise from bed, and eat breakfast!

Shouts rise from the harbor of the blood,

Mist, and masts rising, the knock of wooden tackle in the sunlight.

Now we sing, and do tiny dances on the kitchen floor.

Our whole body is like a harbor at dawn;

We know that our master has left us for the day.

*********

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 ~ Longing.)

Poets United Midweek Motif ~ Word

       “Poetry is an emotion that has found its thought and the thought has found words.” — Robert Frost

“A word of encouragement from a teacher to a child can change a life. A word of encouragement from a spouse can save a marriage. A word of encouragement from a leader can inspire a person to reach her potential.”— John C. maxwell

        Midweek Motif ~ Word  

Word is like air for wordsmiths to breathe. It is their voice, their world. It gives them a wonderful path, assures a magical journey and destination.

While Kipling emphasizes that words are the most powerful drug used by mankind, to Aldous Huxley words are like X-rays if used properly can go through anything.

Who can deny the huge power of words in slogans, speeches, songs, stories and poetry?

Today’s motif is Word. We would love to see Words with wings, stings and whatever you wish to have with it.

Words

by Edward Thomas

Out of us all
That make rhymes
Will you choose
Sometimes -
As the winds use
A crack in a wall
Or a drain,
Their joy or their pain
To whistle through -
Choose me,
You English words?

I know you:
You are light as dreams,
Tough as oak,
Precious as gold,
As poppies and corn,
Or an old cloak:
Sweet as our birds
To the ear,
As the burnet rose
In the heat
Of Midsummer:
Strange as the races
Of dead and unborn:
Strange and sweet
Equally,
And familiar,
To the eye,
As the dearest faces
That a man knows,
And as lost homes are:
But though older far
Than oldest yew, -
As our hills are, old, -
Worn new
Again and again:
Young as our streams
After rain:
And as dear
As the earth which you prove
That we love.

Make me content
With some sweetness
From Wales
Whose nightingales
Have no wings, -
From Wiltshire and Kent
And Herefordshire, -
And the villages there, -
From the names, and the things
No less.
Let me sometimes dance
With you,
Or climb
Or stand perchance
In ecstasy,
Fixed and free
In a rhyme,
As poets do. 

A Word

by Emily Dickinson

A word is dead

When it is said,

        Some say.

I say it just

Begins to live

        That day.

Our Words

by Ruby Archer

Our words are clouds, and fleeting shadow cast

Upon the landscape of a life. Sometimes

One rests above a hillside like a blush,

And sometimes darkens more a deep ravine:

For sunny hill—a needful, pensive charm,

For dark ravine—one more degree of gloom.

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 ~ Voice)

             

  

Poet United Midweek Motif ~ Moon

A Lunar Eclipse Glows Red

“Just like moons and suns,

With certainty of tides,

Just like hopes springing high,

Still I'll rise.”

                                                       ― Maya Angelou

“The moon does not fight. It attacks no one. It does not worry. It does not try to crush others. It keeps to its course, but by its very nature, it gently influences. What other body could pull an entire ocean from shore to shore?" 

― Ming-Dao Deng, Everyday Tao

"Those are the same stars, and that is the same moon, that look down upon your brothers and sisters, and which they see as they look up to them, though they are ever so far away from us, and each other." 

―Sojourner Truth

🌕

Midweek Motif ~ Moon

Today is a special day for the moon:  

Source

Today you may witness a "Super" blue moon, coinciding with a lunar eclipse for the 1st time in 150 years.  Moonlight and lunacy, light and shadow, ever leaving and ever returning ~ 

Your Challenge: Does today's convergence magnify or change the moon's character?  Make a new poem  for the moon, using a perspective new to you.

                 

Full Moon and Little Frieda

by Ted Hughes

A cool small evening shrunk to a dog bark and the clank of a bucket -

And you listening.

A spider's web, tense for the dew's touch.

A pail lifted, still and brimming - mirror

To tempt a first star to a tremor.

Cows are going home in the lane there, looping the hedges with their warm

wreaths of breath -

A dark river of blood, many boulders,

Balancing unspilled milk.

'Moon!' you cry suddenly, 'Moon! Moon!'

The moon has stepped back like an artist gazing amazed at a work

That points at him amazed.
🌕

Having Lost My Sons, I Confront the Wreckage 
Of The Moon: Christmas, 1960  
by James Wright

After dark
Near the South Dakota border,
The moon is out hunting, everywhere,
Delivering fire,
And walking down hallways
Of a diamond.

Behind a tree,
It ights on the ruins
Of a white city
Frost, frost.

Where are they gone
Who lived there?

Bundled away under wings
And dark faces.

I am sick
Of it, and I go on
Living, alone, alone,
Past the charred silos, past the hidden graves
Of Chippewas and Norwegians.

This cold winter
Moon spills the inhuman fire
Of jewels
Into my hands.

Dead riches, dead hands, the moon
Darkens,
And I am lost in the beautiful white ruins
Of America.
🌕

Full Moon by Du Fu

Above the tower -- a lone, twice-sized moon.

On the cold river passing night-filled homes,

It scatters restless gold across the waves.

On mats, it shines richer than silken gauze.

Empty peaks, silence: among sparse stars,

Not yet flawed, it drifts. Pine and cinnamon

Spreading in my old garden . . . All light,

All ten thousand miles at once in its light! 

🌕

Song Of The Moon

by Claude McKay

The moonlight breaks upon the city's domes,

And falls along cemented steel and stone,

Upon the grayness of a million homes,

Lugubrious in unchanging monotone.

Upon the clothes behind the tenement,

That hang like ghosts suspended from the lines,

Linking each flat to each indifferent,

Incongruous and strange the moonlight shines.

There is no magic from your presence here,

Ho, moon, sad moon, tuck up your trailing robe,

Whose silver seems antique and so severe

Against the glow of one electric globe.

o spill your beauty on the laughing faces

Of happy flowers that bloom a thousand hues,

Waiting on tiptoe in the wilding spaces,

To drink your wine mixed with sweet drafts of dews. 

🌕

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 ~ Shoes)

Poets United Midweek Motif ~ Enlightenment

Many spiritual teachers - in Buddhism, in Islam - have talked about first-hand experience of the world as an important part of the path to wisdom, to enlightenment.

bell hooks

To  conquer oneself is a greater task 

than conquering others.

An individual has not started living until he can rise above the narrow confines of his individualistic concerns to the broader concerns of all humanity.
Martin Luther King Jr. (Famous Quotes)

I have nothing new to teach the world. Truth and Non-violence are as old as the hills. All I have done is to try experiments in both on as vast a scale as I could. 
Mahatma Gandhi (Gandhi Quotes)

We are formed and molded by our thoughts. Those whose minds are shaped by selfless thoughts give joy when they speak or act. Joy follows them like a shadow that never leaves them.
Lord Buddha (Buddha Quotes)

Midweek Motif ~ Enlightenment

So much has been said about enlightenment that maybe there is nothing more to say.  But I don't believe it.  In big ways and in small, we all have some experience with enlightenment.  What can you say?  

Your Challenge:  Write a poem containing a nugget of enlightenment.  

~

Excerpt from Augeries of Innocence BY William Blake Man was made for joy and woe;
And when this we rightly know,
Thro’ the world we safely go.
Joy and woe are woven fine,
A clothing for the soul divine.
Under every grief and pine
Runs a joy with silken twine. . . . .   (lines 56-62; read the rest HERE at Bartleby.com)

The CrystalGazer

BY  Sara Teasdale

I shall gather myself into myself again,
I shall take my scattered selves and make them one,
Fusing them into a polished crystal ball
Where I can see the moon and the flashing sun.

I shall sit like a sibyl, hour after hour intent,
Watching the future come and the present go,
And the little shifting pictures of people rushing
In restless self-importance to and fro. 

Admit Something

BY Hafiz

Everyone you see, you say to them,

Love me.

Of course you do not do this out loud;

Otherwise,

Someone would call the cops.

Still though, think about this,

This great pull in us

To connect.

Why not become the one

Who lives with a full moon in each eye

That is always saying,

With that sweet moon language,

What every other eye in this world

Is dying to Hear.

~

For those who are new to Poets United: 

• Post your enlightenment poem on your site, and then link it here.
• Share only original and new work written for this challenge. 
• If you use a picture include its link.  
• Please leave a comment here and visit and comment on our poems.

(Our next Midweek Motif is "foolishness")

Good luck to all of you who are writing a poem a day during April.  I am using prompts from Poetic Asides, NaPoWriMo, Magaly Guerrero  and Imaginary Garden with Real Toads.  We'd love to know if you are attempting the challenge.  Please share links to the sites you are using for prompts and community during the challenge. 

Thanks!  ~Susan for Poets United

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Poets United Midweek Motif ~ Happy Birthday

Colored lanterns at the Lotus Lantern
Festival in Seoul, South Korea,
celebrating the anniversary
of the Buddha's birthday

“So what if nobody came?
I’ll have all the ice cream and tea,
And I’ll laugh with myself,
And I’ll dance with myself,
And I’ll sing, “Happy Birthday to me!”
 ― Shel Silverstein

“Rocket ships
are exciting
but so are roses
on a birthday.” 
― Leonard Nimoy, Come Be With Me

Midweek Motif ~ Happy Birthday

Everyone and everything I know of has a birthday.  Today I ask you to celebrate a specific birth in honor of Spring which officially begins tomorrow, March 20th on the vernal Equinox.   Choose someone or thing you want to think about; choose yourself or someone you love; or choose a day you gave birth to a baby or to an idea.   Consider making your poem a birthday song.

[I THANK YOU GOD FOR MOST THIS AMAZING]

                                      E.E. Cummings

i thank You God for most this amazing
day: for the leaping greenly spirits of trees
and a blue true dream of sky; and for everything
which is natural which is infinite which is yes

(i who have died am alive again today,
and this is the sun's birthday; this is the birth
day of life and of love and wings: and of the gay
great happening illimitably earth)

how should tasting touching hearing seeing
breathing any--lifted from the no
of all nothing--human merely being
doubt unimaginable You?

(now the ears of my ears awake and
now the eyes of my eyes are opened)

See also:

Cheerios by Billy Collins,  A Birthday by Christina Rossetti, and Morning Song by Sylvia Plath.

(Next week's Midweek Motif will be on speaking more than one language.)

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