Poets United Midweek Motif ~ Climate Change

“Habitat Degradation: Deforestation” 

Art and caption by Jill Pelto
(Used here with permission.)
"This painting uses data showing the decline in rain forest area from 1970 to 2010.These lush ecosystems are disappearing before our eyes, and with them, millions of beautiful species. For this series, I chose to separate the animals from their habitat, because that is ultimately what we are doing.
The tiger is trapped outside the forest, cornered. "
(Read the full article and view more paintings HERE.)
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“Action is the antidote to despair.” ~ Edward Abbey

“Climate change ignores borders, but so do friendship and solidarity. It is time for national interests to give way to the global good.” ~ Dr Saleemul Huq

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See  "Climate Change, The Musical" !

(Warning: Tough Love)

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Midweek Motif ~ Climate Change

So many global statements have been made about climate change ~ both learned and popular ~ that I implore myself and you to do something different in our poetry: Make it personal and specific.  Amplify an aspect of the world so that others can see it too.  Whatever your politics and moral positions are when it comes to climate change ~ let us see details, the evidence of your senses, your time and your spirit.  Make us hear, see, touch your world.  

This, then, is the challenge 
for your new poem. 

WILD GEESE by Mary Oliver

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
For a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting —
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.

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Love Poems in the Time of Climate Change

By CRAIG SANTOS PEREZ
March 3, 2017

Sonnet XVII

I don’t love you as if you were rare earth metals, diamonds,
or reserves of crude oil that propagate war:
I love you as one loves most vulnerable things,
urgently, between the habitat and its loss.

I love you as the seed that doesn’t sprout but carries
the heritage of our roots, secured, within a vault,
and thanks to your love the organic taste that ripens
from the fruit lives sweetly on my tongue.

I love you without knowing how, or when, the world will end—
I love you naturally without pesticides or pills—
I love you like this because we won’t survive any other way,
except in this form in which humans and nature are kin,
so close that your emissions of carbon are mine,
so close that your sea rises with my heat.

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See more poetry at CHICAGO REVIEW OF BOOKS.COM

 "Burning Worlds: The Best Poems 

About Climate Change" 
BY AMY BRADY ON AUGUST 30, 2017 

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Listen to

UN Climate Summit Poem "Dear Matafele Peinem" 

by Kathy Jetnil-Kijiner (Marshall Islands)

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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 ~ Darkness is . . . )

Poets United Midweek Motif ~ Wilderness

   

   “Wilderness is not a luxury but a necessity of the human spirit.”— Edward Abbey

Christ in the Wilderness by Ivan Kramskoi

“To plunder, to slaughter, to steal, these things they misname empire; and where they make a wilderness, they call it peace.”— Tacitus

Midweek Motif ~ Wilderness

This week we are away from our frenzied, civilized lives into the wilderness, places untrammeled by man: in reality or in imagination (like hikes with friends or solitary day trips).

You might also discover a bit of wilderness, traces of the wild in the cities / in people too.

Is wilderness a place? Is it an instinct? Is it an idea?

How does wilderness make you feel?

Share some wilderness moments in your poems today:

A Voice In The Wilderness

by Audrey Hepburn

            

I roamed the streets of Rome,
It felt like home,
People told me to stay,
But I said no 'This is my Roman Holiday',

I was a flower seller, poor and dirty,
but sang like a canary,
Henry Higgins said maybe,
And called me his Fair Lady.

I was being chased,
Life was a maze,
Four men made it a craze,
It was more like a game of charades. 

Wilderness

by Carl Sandburg

There is a wolf in me . . . fangs pointed for tearing gashes . . . a red tongue for raw meat . . . and the hot lapping of blood—I keep this wolf because the wilderness gave it to me and the wilderness will not let it go.    

               

There is a fox in me . . . a silver-gray fox . . . I sniff and guess . . . I pick things out of the wind and air . . . I nose in the dark night and take sleepers and eat them and hide the feathers . . . I circle and loop and double-cross.

There is a hog in me . . . a snout and a belly . . . a machinery for eating and grunting . . . a machinery for sleeping satisfied in the sun—I got this too from the wilderness and the wilderness will not let it go.

There is a fish in me . . . I know I came from salt-blue water-gates . . . I scurried with shoals of herring . . . I blew waterspouts with porpoises . . . before land was . . . before the water went down . . . before Noah . . . before the first chapter of Genesis.

There is a baboon in me . . . clambering-clawed . . . dog-faced . . . yawping a galoot’s hunger . . . hairy under the armpits . . . here are the hawk-eyed hankering men . . . here are the blonde and blue-eyed women . . . here they hide curled asleep waiting . . . ready to snarl and kill . . . ready to sing and give milk . . . waiting—I keep the baboon because the wilderness says so.

There is an eagle in me and a mockingbird . . . and the eagle flies among the Rocky Mountains of my dreams and fights among the Sierra crags of what I want . . . and the mockingbird warbles in the early forenoon before the dew is gone, warbles in the underbrush of my Chattanoogas of hope, gushes over the blue Ozark foothills of my wishes—And I got the eagle and the mockingbird from the wilderness.

O, I got a zoo, I got a menagerie, inside my ribs, under my bony head, under my red-valve heart—and I got something else: it is a man-child heart, a woman-child heart: it is a father and mother and lover: it came from God-Knows-Where: it is going to God-Knows-Where—For I am the keeper of the zoo: I say yes and no: I sing and kill and work: I am a pal of the world: I came from the wilderness.

 Anecdote of the Jar

by Wallace Stevens

I placed a jar in Tennessee,

And round it was, upon a hill.

It made the slovenly wilderness

Surround that hill.

The wilderness rose up to it,

And sprawled around, no longer wild.

The jar was round upon the ground

And tall and of a port in air.

It took dominion everywhere.

The jar was gray and bare.

It did not give of bird or bush,

Like nothing else in Tennessee.

    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 ~ "a bundle of contradictions" or Anne Frank's last letter)

Poets United Midweek Motif ~ Predator and Prey

"We are kindred all of us, killer and victim, predator and prey, me and the sly coyote, the soaring buzzard, the elegant gopher snake,and trembling cottontail, the foul worms that feed on our entrails; all of them, all of us. Long live diversity, long live the earth!"---Edward Abbey

Source

Midweek Motif ~ Predator & Prey

Is not the cowardly, predatoryspirit of Stalin concealed within us,when we do not seek truth,and only fear the new?I rush at untruth like a devil,Will never give up the battle with the old,But how can we live here, when within us                                Stalin is not dead.

The lines are an excerpt from the Russian poet Boris Chichibabin’s poem By The banner Of Happiness I Swear.

Life exists with both the spirits of predators and preys. As in animal kingdom so in human society.
The most interesting point is that predators and preys evolve together. One, in order to eat and the other to avoid being eaten. 


Think on this theme of Predator and Prey and write your poem.

A few poems to inspire:

La Belle Dame sans Merci

by John Keats

O what can ail thee, knight-at-arms, 

       Alone and palely loitering? 
The sedge has withered from the lake, 
       And no birds sing. 
O what can ail thee, knight-at-arms, 
       So haggard and so woe-begone? 
The squirrel’s granary is full, 
       And the harvest’s done. 
I see a lily on thy brow, 
       With anguish moist and fever-dew, 
And on thy cheeks a fading rose 
       Fast withereth too. 
I met a lady in the meads, 
       Full beautiful—a faery’s child, 
Her hair was long, her foot was light, 
       And her eyes were wild. 
I made a garland for her head, 
       And bracelets too, and fragrant zone; 
She looked at me as she did love, 
       And made sweet moan
I set her on my pacing steed, 
       And nothing else saw all day long, 
For sidelong would she bend, and sing 
       A faery’s song. 
She found me roots of relish sweet, 
       And honey wild, and manna-dew, 
And sure in language strange she said— 
       ‘I love thee true’. 
She took me to her Elfin grot, 
       And there she wept and sighed full sore, 
And there I shut her wild wild eyes 
       With kisses four. 
And there she lullèd me asleep, 
       And there I dreamed—Ah! woe betide!— 
The latest dream I ever dreamt 
       On the cold hill side. 
                     

     (The rest is here)

                 The Eagle

                  by Alfred Tennyson

             He clasps the crag with crooked hands; 

         Close to the sun in lonely lands, 
         Ring'd with the azure world, he stands. 
         The wrinkled sea beneath him crawls; 
         He watches from his mountain walls, 
         And like a thunderbolt he falls. 

Epitaph on A Tyrant

by W.H. Auden

Perfection, of a kind, was what he was after
And the poetry he invented was easy to understand;

He knew human folly like the back of his hand,
And was greatly interested in armies and fleets;
When he laughed, respectable senators burst with laughter,
And when he cried the little children died in the streets.

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 ~ Cats)

Poets United Midweek Motif ~ Cancer

Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell. 
-Edward Abbey, naturalist and author 

“The failure to think positively can weigh on 

a cancer patient like a second disease.” 
― Barbara Ehrenreich, Bright-Sided . . .  

“When one person gets cancer, the whole family gets cancer.” 

― Shirley Corder, Strength Renewed . . . 

Midweek Motif ~ Cancer

4th February 2015 is World Cancer Day.

 "Taking place under the tagline ‘Not beyond us,’ World Cancer Day 2015 will take a positive and pro-active approach to the fight against cancer, highlighting that solutions do exist across the continuum of cancer, and that they are within our reach."  

(Please explore the World Cancer Day website for information and ideas.)

Your Challenge:  Treat a cancer and/or a cure poetically.   Emotions and Insights are welcome.

~

Snow White to the Prince  

By Chris Tus

          (after Susan Thomas )

Truth is, my life was no fairytale, 

that afternoon, I lay, a smiling corpse 

under a glass sky, a rotten apple 

lodged in my throat like a black lump 

of cancer, your sloppy kiss dying on my lips. 
. . . . 
          (Read more HERE at Poetry Soup.com)

Doctors 

By Anne Sexton 

They work with herbs 

and penicillin 

They work with gentleness 

and the scalpel. 

They dig out the cancer, 

close an incision 

and say a prayer 

to the poverty of the skin. 

. . . . 

(Read more HERE at Poetry Soup.com)

“Why should I have been surprised?
Hunters walk the forest
without a sound.
The hunter, strapped to his rifle,
the fox on his feet of silk,
the serpent on his empire of muscles—
all move in a stillness,
hungry, careful, intent.
Just as the cancer
entered the forest of my body,without a sound.” 
― Mary Oliver, Blue Horses: Poems

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For those who are new to Poets United:  

1. Share only original and new work written for this challenge. 
2. Post your new cancer poem on your site, and then link it here.
3. If you use a picture include its link.  
4. Leave a comment here.
5. Visit and comment on our poems.

(Our next Midweek Motif is LOVE is not a greeting card!)

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