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. )

Poets United Midweek Motif ~ Silence

       “In the End, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.” — Martin Luther King, Jr.

SOURCE

“The human heart has hidden treasures, In secret kept, in silence sealed; The thoughts, the hopes, the dreams, the pleasures, Whose charms were broken if revealed.” — Charlotte Brontë

       Midweek Motif ~ Silence

We all know how still, quiet or at rest Silence is. What an absolutely soundless world we enter into if we could really step into Silence!

How to bring Silence into this cacophonous, noisy world?

Where to find that soundlessness? Is Silence merely absence of sound or more than that?

Or is it this Silence that we fear most so we fill up every inch of it with sound? Is Silence oppressive?

Let’s explore the world of Silence today:

Silence

by Thomas Hood

There is a silence where hath been no sound,
There is a silence where no sound may be,
In the cold grave—under the deep, deep sea,
Or in wide desert where no life is found,
Which hath been mute, and still must sleep profound;
No voice is hush’d—no life treads silently,
But clouds and cloudy shadows wander free,
That never spoke, over the idle ground:
But in green ruins, in the desolate walls
Of antique palaces, where Man hath been,
Though the dun fox or wild hyæna calls,
And owls, that flit continually between,
Shriek to the echo, and the low winds moan—
There the true Silence is, self-conscious and alone. 

           

After Long Silence

by William Butler Yeats

Speech after long silence; it is right,
All other lovers being estranged or dead,
Unfriendly lamplight hid under its shade,
The curtains drawn upon unfriendly night,
That we descant and yet again descant
Upon the supreme theme of Art and Song:
Bodily decrepitude is wisdom; young
We loved each other and were ignorant. 

Silence

by Marianne Moore

My father used to say,
"Superior people never make long visits,
have to be shown Longfellow's grave
nor the glass flowers at Harvard.
Self reliant like the cat --
that takes its prey to privacy,
the mouse's limp tail hanging like a shoelace from its mouth --
they sometimes enjoy solitude,
and can be robbed of speech
by speech which has delighted them.
The deepest feeling always shows itself in silence;
not in silence, but restraint."
Nor was he insincere in saying, "`Make my house your inn'."
Inns are not residences. 

Aprons Of silence

By Carl Sandburg

Many things I might have said today.
And I kept my mouth shut.
So many times I was asked
To come and say the same things
Everybody was saying, no end
To the yes-yes, yes-yes,
me-too, me-too.

The aprons of silence covered me.
A wire and hatch held my tongue.
I spit nails into an abyss and listened.
I shut off the gable of Jones, Johnson, Smith,
All whose names take pages in the city directory.

I fixed up a padded cell and lugged it around.
I locked myself in and nobody knew it.
Only the keeper and the kept in the hoosegow
Knew it--on the streets, in the post office,
On the cars, into the railroad station
Where the caller was calling, "All a-board,
All a-board for . . . Blaa-blaa . . . Blaa-blaa,
Blaa-blaa . . . and all points northwest . . .all a-board."
Here I took along my own hoosegow
And did business with my own thoughts.
Do you see? It must be the aprons of silence. 

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 ~ Meteor Showers)

Classic Poetry ~ " Life " by Charlotte Brontë

Charlotte Brontë, 1816-1855

Best known for her novels (most notably Jane Eyre, first published under the pseudonym Currer Bell); Charlotte  Brontë was also a published poet who, along with her sisters Anne and Emily, contributed to two collections. All three young women achieved significant literary success before dying in their thirties, Emily and Anne of tuberculosis in 1848 and '49, respectively; Charlotte and her unborn child of typhus in 1855. In both poetry and fiction, Brontë was most successful when she broke new ground by presenting a distinctly female first-person perspective to a public readership. 

LIFE

LIFE, believe, is not a dream
So dark as sages say;
Oft a little morning rain
Foretells a pleasant day.
Sometimes there are clouds of gloom,
But these are transient all;
If the shower will make the roses bloom,
O why lament its fall?

Rapidly, merrily,
Life's sunny hours flit by,
Gratefully, cheerily,
Enjoy them as they fly!

What though Death at times steps in
And calls our Best away?
What though sorrow seems to win,
O'er hope, a heavy sway?
Yet hope again elastic springs,
Unconquered, though she fell;
Still buoyant are her golden wings,
Still strong to bear us well.
Manfully, fearlessly,
The day of trial bear,
For gloriously, victoriously,
Can courage quell despair!