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 ~ Food

"If you can't feed a hundred people, then feed just one"---Mother Teresa

"So long as you have food in your mouth, you have solved all questions for the time being."---Franz Kafka

"Animals are my friends.....and I don't eat my friends"---George Bernard Shaw

"Wine is bottled poetry"---Robert Louis Stevenson

source

Midweek Motif ~ Food

Today I want you to write about "Food" you like or even dislike.

You may deal with pure food items or recipes in your own way or spice it up with figures of speech, various poetic devices.

Have fun!

Here is some food for thought:

The Health-Food Diner

by Maya Angelou

The Health-Food Diner

No sprouted wheat and soya shoots

And Brussels in a cake,

Carrot straw and spinach raw,

(Today, I need a steak).

Not thick brown rice and rice pilaw

Or mushrooms creamed on toast,

Turnips mashed and parsnips hashed,

(I'm dreaming of a roast).

Health-food folks around the world

Are thinned by anxious zeal,

They look for help in sea food kelp

(I count on breaded veal).

No smoking signs, raw mustard greens,

Zucchini by the ton,

Uncooked kale and bodies frail

Are sure to make me run

to

Loins of pork and chicken thighs

And standing rib, so prime,

Pork chops brown and fresh groundround

(I crave them all the time).

Irish stews and boiled corned beef

and hot dogs by the scores,

or any place that saves a space

For making carnivores.

Fame Is A Fickle Food

by Emily Dickinson

Fame is a fickle food

Upon a shifting plate

Whose table once a 

Guest but not

The second time is set

Whose crumbs the crows inspect

And with ironic caw

Flap past it to the Farmer's corn--

Men eat of it and die.

Sonnet 75

by William Shakespeare

So are you to my thoughts as food to life,

Or as sweet seasoned showers to the ground;

And for the peace of you I hold such strife

As 'twixt a miser and his wealth is found:

Now proud as an enjoyer, and anon

Doubting the filching age will steal his treasure;

Now counting best to be with you alone,

Then bettered that the world may see my pleasure;

Sometime all full with feasting on your sight,

And by and by clean starved for a look,

Possessing or pursuing no delight

Save what is had, or must from you be took.

      Thus do I pine and surfeit day by day,

      Or gluttoning on all, or all away.

Oysters

by Seamus Heaney

Our shells clacked on the plate.

My tongue was a filling estuary.

My palate hung with starlight:

As I tasted the salty Pleiades

Orion dipped his foot into the water.

Alive and violated,

They lay on their bed of ice:

Bivalves: the split bulb

And philandering sigh of ocean

Millions of them ripped and shucked and scattered.

We had driven to that coast

Through flowers and limestone

And there we were, toasting friendship,

Laying down a perfect memory

In the cool of thatch and crockery.

Over the Alps, packed deep in hay and snow,

The Romans hauled their oysters south to Roam:

I saw damp panniers disgorge

The frond-lipped, brine-stung

Glut of privilege

And was angry that my trust could not repose

In the clear light, like poetry or freedom

Leaning in from sea. I ate the day

Deliberately, that its tang

Might quicken me all into verb, pure verb.

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 Mountain)

                                                   

Poets United Midweek Motif ~ A Date "that will live in infamy," or a Bomb of a Day

“As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found 
himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect.” 
― Franz Kafka, The Metamorphosis

“After a cruel childhood, one must reinvent oneself. 
Then reimagine the world.” 
― Mary Oliver

General view of Pearl Harbor during
the Japanese air strikes on 7 December 1941,  
U.S. Navy National Museum of Naval Aviation
photo No. 1996.488.029.034.

     In response to the destruction of Pearl Harbor on 7 December 1941, the USA declared war on Japan and officially joined the Ally struggle in WW2. This was the occasion of  USA President FDR's famous Infamy Speech, the source of "date that will live in infamy." 

Midweek Motif ~ 

A Date "that will live in infamy" 

or 

a Bomb of a Day

Some days are so bad that 

they force new decisions and directions.

Your Challenge: Write about a turning-point event in history or in your life.

Here are two poems to inspire:

Pearl Harbor 

By Robinson Jeffers

I.

Here are the fireworks. The men who conspired and labored

To embroil this republic in the wreck of Europe have got their bargain--

And a bushel more. As for me, what can I do but

fly the national flag from the top of the tower?

America has neither race nor religion nor its own language: nation or nothing.

Stare, little tower, 
Confidently across the Pacific, the flag on your

head. . . . 

          

          (Read the rest HERE at The Los Angeles Times.)

Incident

by Countee Cullen

Once riding in old Baltimore,

Heart-filled, head-filled with glee,
I saw a Baltimorean
Keep looking straight at me.

Now I was eight and very small,

And he was no whit bigger,

And so I smiled, but he poked out

His tongue, and called me, 'Nigger.'

I saw the whole of Baltimore

From May until December;

Of all the things that happened there

That's all that I remember. 

For those who are new to Poets United:  

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

(Next week's Midweek Motif is human rights.)

Mister Linky's Magical Widgets -- Auto-Linky widget will appear right here!
This preview will disappear when the widget is displayed on your site.
If this widget does not appear, click here to display it.