Showing posts with label Claude McKay. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Claude McKay. Show all posts

Wednesday, January 31, 2018

Poet United Midweek Motif ~ Moon


lunar eclipse AP
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


Three things cannot be long hidden: the sun, the moon, and the truth. - Buddha



“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?" 


"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." 



๐ŸŒ•

Midweek Motif ~ Moon
Today is a special day for the moon:  

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.

                 


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.
๐ŸŒ•

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.

๐ŸŒ•

Full Moon by Du Fu

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. 
๐ŸŒ•

Wednesday, May 24, 2017

Poets United Midweek Motif ~ Flowers

Flower of Life II, 1925, 1918 by Georgia O'Keeffe

Flower of Life II, 1925, 1918 by Georgia O'Keeffe


"I decided that if I could paint
that flower in a huge scale, you
could not ignore its beauty. ”
- Georgia O'Keeffe


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"The earth laughs in flowers.” 

“I will be the gladdest thing under the sun! I will touch 
a hundred flowers and not pick one.” 
― Edna St. Vincent Millay

“I sometimes think that never blows so red
The Rose as where some buried Caesar bled;
That every Hyacinth the Garden wears
Dropt in its Lap from some once lovely Head.” 

File:Maude Goodmann The daisy chain.jpg
The daisy chain by Maude Goodmann (1844-1936)


Midweek Motif ~ Flowers


Flowers hold memories 

and memories hold flowers.


Your Challenge: In a new poem, memorialize a significant encounter with a flower or flowers.




In a Burying Ground

by Sara Teasdale


This is the spot where I will lie
When life has had enough of me,
These are the grasses that will blow
Above me like a living sea.
These gay old lilies will not shrink
To draw their life from death of mine,
And I will give my body's fire
To make blue flowers on this vine.
"O Soul," I said, "have you no tears?
Was not the body dear to you?"
I heard my soul say carelessly,
"The myrtle flowers will grow more blue."

by Claude McKay
Far from this foreign Easter damp and chilly
My soul steals to a pear-shaped plot of ground,
Where gleamed the lilac-tinted Easter lily
Soft-scented in the air for yards around;

Alone, without a hint of guardian leaf!
Just like a fragile bell of silver rime,
It burst the tomb for freedom sweet and brief
In the young pregnant year at Eastertime;

And many thought it was a sacred sign,
And some called it the resurrection flower;
And I, a pagan, worshiped at its shrine,
Yielding my heart unto its perfumed power.





Peonies
by Mary Oliver

This morning the green fists of the peonies are getting ready
to break my heart
as the sun rises,
as the sun strokes them with his old, buttery fingers
and they open–
pools of lace,
white and pink–
and all day the black ants climb over them,
boring their deep and mysterious holes
into the curls,
craving the sweet sap,
taking it away
to their dark, underground cities–
and all day
under the shifty wind,
as in a dance to the great wedding,
the flowers bend their bright bodies,
and tip their fragrance to the air,
and rise,
their red stems holding
all that dampness and recklessness
gladly and lightly,
and there it is again–
beauty the brave, the exemplary,
blazing open.
Do you love this world?
Do you cherish your humble and silky life?
Do you adore the green grass, with its terror beneath?
Do you also hurry, half-dressed and barefoot, into the garden,
and softly,
and exclaiming of their dearness,
fill your arms with the white and pink flowers,
with their honeyed heaviness, their lush trembling,
their eagerness
to be wild and perfect for a moment, before they are
nothing, forever?

    (Please forgive me for posting all of "Peony" without permission.  I love it.)  





Every Flower - Noel Paul Stookey with John Payne on saxophone

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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 ~  Smoking Tobacco ~
as 5/31 is World No Tobacco Day.)

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