Poets United Midweek Motif ~ Truth

“The truth isn't always beauty, but the hunger for it is.” 

― Nadine Gordimer

“Writing needs raw truth, wants your suffering and darkness on the table, revels in a cutting mind that takes no prisoners...” 

― Natalie Goldberg

“Truth has to be repeated constantly, because Error also is being preached all the time, and not just by a few, but by the multitude.” 

― Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Truth, holding a mirror and a serpent, by  Olin Levi Warner (1896).

 Midweek Motif ~ Truth

Back in the 1970s,  Adrienne Rich’s “Women and Honor: Some Notes on Lying” asserted that  omission of truth is as much a lie as falsifying of information.  Honor demands truth. Rich says:

“The unconscious wants truth, as the body does. The complexity and fecundity of dreams come from the complexity and fecundity of the unconscious struggling to fulfill that desire.”  

I believe we poets aim always to tell the truth about things and about truth itself.   But truth is difficult. 

Your challenge:  Choose a truth to tell in a poem.  Or tell us how and where to find “the truth.”

Allegory of Truth by Jacopo Tintoretto (1 January 1564)

Sonnet 138: 

When My Love Swears That She Is Made Of Truth

by William Shakespeare

When my love swears that she is made of truth

I do believe her, though I know she lies,

That she might think me some untutored youth,

Unlearnèd in the world's false subtleties.

Thus vainly thinking that she thinks me young,

Although she knows my days are past the best,

Simply I credit her false-speaking tongue;

On both sides thus is simple truth suppressed.

But wherefore says she not she is unjust?

And wherefore say not I that I am old?

O, love's best habit is in seeming trust,

And age in love, loves not to have years told.

Therefore I lie with her, and she with me,

And in our faults by lies we flattered be. 

~

Truth Coming Out of Her Well to Shame Mankind by  Jean-Léon Gérôme (1896) 

~

Tell all the truth but tell it slant — (1263)

BY EMILY DICKINSON

Tell all the truth but tell it slant —

Success in Circuit lies

Too bright for our infirm Delight

The Truth's superb surprise

As Lightning to the Children eased

With explanation kind

The Truth must dazzle gradually

Or every man be blind —

Search for Truth

by DH Lawrence

Search for nothing any more, nothing
except truth.
Be very still, and try and get at the truth.

And the first question to ask yourself is:
How great a liar am I? 

A Truth, a Poem
~

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 ~ Running.)

Poets United Midweek Motif ~ May Day or Walpurgis Night

Midweek Motif ~ May Day  

or Walpurgisnacht

Today's challenge is to write a poem for May Day or to give a poetic account of a celebration that was.

Today is May Day's Eve.  Whether you know May Day as a worker, union member, politician, pagan, Christian or another tradition, it is a day to celebrate loudly.  Yet at various times and places in history one or the other of these celebrations was dangerous. 

You may know it from music or poetry, Mendelssohn, Goethe, or Tennyson. Here are links to Wikipedia's general information on May Day folk celebrations (like Walpurgis Night) and International Workers Day.  

Queen Guinevere's Maying by John Collier, 1900

"For thus it chanced one morn when all the court,
Green-suited, but with plumes that mocked the may,
Had been, their wont, a-maying and returned,
That Modred still in green, all ear and eye,
Climbed to the high top of the garden-wall
To spy some secret scandal if he might ..."

from Idylls of the King: "Guinevere" by Alfred Lord Tennyson (1859).

For me the day marks the end of the poetry challenge for the month of April, the first steps to plans I made all winter and the beginning of What. Is. Next. 

Please:
  

1.      Post your  new  poem on your site, and then link it here.

2.      Share only original and new work written for this challenge. 

3.      Leave a comment here.

4.      Honor our community by visiting and commenting on others' poems.

(The next Midweek motif will be  Children.)

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