Poets United Midweek Motif ~ Prayer

The sacred Mount Kailash in Tibet.
From Bild:Kailash Tibet.jpg; photo taken by Heringf. 

“I talk to God but the sky is empty.” 

― Sylvia Plath

“If the only prayer you said was thank you, that would be enough.” 

― Meister Eckhart

“You pray in your distress and in your need; would that you might pray also in the fullness of your joy and in your days of abundance.” ― Kahill Gibran

“I prayed for freedom for twenty years, but received no answer 

until I prayed with my legs.” ― Frederick Douglass

"I believe some people-- lots of people-- pray through the witness of their lives, through the work they do, the friendships they have, the love they offer people and receive from people. Since when are words the only acceptable form of prayer?” ― Dorothy Day

"There are hundreds of ways to kneel and kiss the ground.”― Rumi

source

Midweek Motif ~ Prayer

Thousands of poems say they are prayers, and hundreds of books exist about prayer.  Still more poems and prose are prayer-like without saying so ~ Walt Whitman's and Mary Oliver's poems, for example. 

So what can we add?  Poems about our experience-based knowledge?  Mystic moments?  Silence? Rejection? Love?  

What haven't you said?  

What bears repeating?

Your Challenge:  Write a new poem in which the narrator observes prayer or reveals some truth about prayer.

Praying Hands by Albrecht Dürer

I happened to be Standing
by Mary Oliver

"I don't know where prayers go,
     or what they do.
Do cats pray, while they sleep
     half-asleep in the sun?
Does the opossum pray as it
     crosses the street?
The sunflowers? The old black oak
     growing older every year?" 

far memory

BY LUCILLE CLIFTON

a poem in seven parts

1

convent

my knees recall the pockets

worn into the stone floor,

my hands, tracing against

the wall their original name, remember

the cold brush of brick, and the smell

of the brick powdery and wet

and the light finding its way in

through the high bars.

and also the sisters singing

at matins, their sweet music

the voice of the universe at peace

and the candles their light the light

at the beginning of creation

and the wonderful simplicity of prayer

smooth along the wooden beads

and certainly attended.

2

someone inside me remembers

that my knees must be hidden away

that my hair must be shorn

so that vanity will not test me

that my fingers are places of prayer

and are holy that my body is promised

to something more certain

than myself

. . . .

(Read the rest HERE.)

The Ballad of Reading Gaol

BY OSCAR WILDE

I 

He did not wear his scarlet coat, 

For blood and wine are red, 

And blood and wine were on his hands 

When they found him with the dead, 

The poor dead woman whom he loved, 

And murdered in her bed. 

He walked amongst the Trial Men 

In a suit of shabby gray; 

A cricket cap was on his head, 

And his step seemed light and gay; 

But I never saw a man who looked 

So wistfully at the day. 

I never saw a man who looked 

With such a wistful eye 

Upon that little tent of blue 

Which prisoners call the sky, 

And at every drifting cloud that went 

With sails of silver by. 

I walked, with other souls in pain, 

Within another ring, 

And was wondering if the man had done 

A great or little thing, 

When a voice behind me whispered low, 

"That fellow's got to swing." 

Dear Christ! the very prison walls 

Suddenly seemed to reel, 

And the sky above my head became 

Like a casque of scorching steel; 

And, though I was a soul in pain, 

My pain I could not feel. 

I only knew what hunted thought 

Quickened his step, and why 

He looked upon the garish day 

With such a wistful eye; 

The man had killed the thing he loved, 

And so he had to die. 

Yet each man kills the thing he loves, 

By each let this be heard, 

Some do it with a bitter look, 

Some with a flattering word, 

The coward does it with a kiss, 

The brave man with a sword! 

Some kill their love when they are young, 

And some when they are old; 

Some strangle with the hands of Lust, 

Some with the hands of Gold: 

The kindest use a knife, because 

The dead so soon grow cold. 

Some love too little, some too long, 

Some sell, and others buy; 

Some do the deed with many tears, 

And some without a sigh: 

For each man kills the thing he loves, 

Yet each man does not die. 

. . . . 

(Read the rest HERE.)

Norman Rockwell, Golden Rule, 1961.
Source
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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 ~ Morning Poem.)

Poets United Midweek Motif ~ Power

“The day the power of love overrules the love of power, the world will know peace.” 
― Mahatma Gandhi

“There is a special place in hell for women who don't help other women."
― Madeleine Albright

“Washing one's hands of the conflict between the powerful and the powerless 

means to side with the powerful, not to be neutral. ” 
― Paulo Freire

The struggle may be a moral one, or it may be a physical one, or it may be both. 

But it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. 

It never did and it never will.” 
― Frederick Douglass

EXCLUSIVE by GOLDIE TAYLOR: Newsome Speaks
For The First Time After Courageous Act of Civil Disobedience:  

"We discussed it and decided to remove the flag immediately, both as an act of civil disobedience and as a demonstration of the power people have when we work together."

-Bree Newsome

Midweek Motif  ~ Power

Power, power: Who's got the power?  

Dictionary.com has 20 definitions of "power"--and that's just as a noun!  You may use any of them.  But I challenge you to write a poem that demonstrates "the power people have when we work together."

Alternatively, describe your fantasy secret power.

source

The French Revolution as It Appeared to Enthusiasts at Its Commencement

BY WILLIAM WORDSWORTH

Oh! pleasant exercise of hope and joy!

For mighty were the auxiliars which then stood

Upon our side, we who were strong in love!

Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,

But to be young was very heaven!—Oh! times,

In which the meagre, stale, forbidding ways

Of custom, law, and statute, took at once

The attraction of a country in romance!

When Reason seemed the most to assert her rights,

When most intent on making of herself

A prime Enchantress—to assist the work

Which then was going forward in her name!

. . . . 

Read the rest Here at the Poetry Foundation.

The Meaning of the Shovel

BY MARTÍN ESPADA

—Barrio René Cisneros 

Managua, Nicaragua, June-July 1982

This was the dictator’s land

before the revolution.

Now the dictator is exiled to necropolis,

his army brooding in camps on the border,

and the congregation of the landless

stipples the earth with a thousand shacks,

every weatherbeaten carpenter

planting a fistful of nails.

Here I dig latrines. I dig because last week

I saw a funeral in the streets of Managua,

the coffin swaddled in a red and black flag,

hoisted by a procession so silent

that even their feet seemed

to leave no sound on the gravel.

He was eighteen, with the border patrol,

when a sharpshooter from the dictator’s army

took aim at the back of his head.

. . . .

Read the rest HERE at the Poetry Foundation.

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 ~ UNITY)

Poets United Midweek Motif ~ Captivity

“We are determined to answer evil with GOOD, slavery with FREEDOM, 
rape with hope!  We are against slavery, rape, beheading, torture, 
violations of human rights, corruption and misuse of religion!” 
― Widad Akrawi

“Knowledge makes a man unfit to be a slave.” 
― Frederick Douglass

“The caged eagle become a metaphor for all forms of isolation, 

the ultimate in imprisonment. A zoo is prison.” 
― Nadine Gordimer, Get a Life

source

Midweek Motif  ~ Captivity

The United Nations uses March 25th to observe two separate International Days for victims of slavery and other forms of captivity.  Follow the links to read more about the United Nations' resolutions:

• International Day of Remembrance of the Victims of Slavery and the Transatlantic Slave Trade:  ". . . tribute to the many women who suffered and died during the slave trade . . . "
• International Day of Solidarity with Detained and Missing Staff Members:  ". . . protect United Nations staff and peacekeepers, as well as our colleagues in the non-governmental community and the media."

YOUR CHALLENGE:  Describe a captivity in a poem using imagery and narrative story ~ OR, simply use captivity as a motif.

my own photo in Père Lachaise Cemetery

Excerpt from  To the Right Honourable William, Earl of Dartmouth

by Phillis Wheatley, 1753 - 1784 

. . . . .

Should you, my lord, while you peruse my song,
Wonder from whence my love of Freedom sprung,
Whence flow these wishes for the common good,
By feeling hearts alone best understood,
I, young in life, by seeming cruel fate
Was snatch’d from Afric’s fancy’d happy seat:
What pangs excruciating must molest,
What sorrows labour in my parent’s breast?
Steel’d was that soul and by no misery mov’d
That from a father seiz’d his babe belov’d:
Such, such my case.  And can I then but pray
Others may never feel tyrannic sway?

. . . .   (Read the rest HERE at Poetry.ORG.)

The Captive Dove 

byAnne Bronte 

Poor restless dove, I pity thee; 

And when I hear thy plaintive moan, 

I mourn for thy captivity, 

And in thy woes forget mine own. 

To see thee stand prepared to fly,

 And flap those useless wings of thine, 

And gaze into the distant sky, 

Would melt a harder heart than mine. 

In vain ­ in vain! Thou canst not rise: 

Thy prison roof confines thee there;

 Its slender wires delude thine eyes, 

And quench thy longings with despair.

. . . . 

(Read the rest HERE at Poetry Soup.)

# 
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(Our next Midweek Motif is "cherry blossoms.")

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