Poets United Midweek Motif ~ Resilience

http://www.theschooloflife.com/london/shop/resilience-one-day-workshop-5/

"The energy expended in pushing down despair is diverted from more creative uses, depleting the resilience and imagination needed for fresh visions and strategies."
~Joanna Macy

"There is no way to re-enchant our lives in a disenchanted culture except by becoming renegades from that culture and planting the seeds for a new one."

~Thomas Moore

"The more we focus on trying to instill grit, the less likely we’ll be to question larger policies and institutions."

~ Alfie Kohn

Midweek Motif ~
 Resilience

Whether the topic is climate change, endangered species, burnt trees or trauma of human varieties, we hope to discover resilience. More than resistance, "resilience" is growing better and stronger in moving beyond the obstacle. But what if real social change is needed?  
When is individual resilience enough?

Your challenge: In your new poem, define/clarify resilience by example. 

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Solitude

by Ella Wheeler Wilcox

Laugh, and the world laughs with you; 

Weep, and you weep alone. 

For the sad old earth must borrow its mirth, 

But has trouble enough of its own. 

Sing, and the hills will answer; 

Sigh, it is lost on the air. 

The echoes bound to a joyful sound, 

But shrink from voicing care.

Rejoice, and men will seek you; 

Grieve, and they turn and go. 

They want full measure of all your pleasure, 

But they do not need your woe. 

Be glad, and your friends are many; 

Be sad, and you lose them all. 

There are none to decline your nectared wine, 

But alone you must drink life's gall.

Feast, and your halls are crowded; 

Fast, and the world goes by. 

Succeed and give, and it helps you live, 

But no man can help you die. 

There is room in the halls of pleasure 

For a long and lordly train, 

But one by one we must all file on 

Through the narrow aisles of pain.

Reading © Classic Poetry Aloud, 2007.

Invictus

Related Poem Content Details

BY WILLIAM ERNEST HENLEY

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Out of the night that covers me, 

Black as the pit from pole to pole,

I thank whatever gods may be 

      For my unconquerable soul. 

In the fell clutch of circumstance 

      I have not winced nor cried aloud. 

Under the bludgeonings of chance 

      My head is bloody, but unbowed. 

Beyond this place of wrath and tears 

      Looms but the Horror of the shade, 

And yet the menace of the years 

      Finds and shall find me unafraid. 

It matters not how strait the gate, 

      How charged with punishments the scroll, 

I am the master of my fate, 

      I am the captain of my soul. 

Lodged
BY ROBERT FROST

The rain to the wind said,
'You push and I'll pelt.'
They so smote the garden bed
That the flowers actually knelt,
And lay lodged - though not dead.
I know how the flowers felt. 

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Please share your new poem with Mr. Linky below and visit others 

in the spirit of the community.

(Next week Susan's Midweek Motif will be ~ Birthdays )

Poets United Midweek Motif ~ Climate

“Pray don't talk to me about the weather, Mr. Worthing. Whenever people talk to me about the weather, I always feel quite certain that they mean something else.  
And that makes me quite nervous.” 
― Oscar Wilde

“Men argue. Nature acts.” ― Voltaire

“One of the biggest differences between humans and trees 

is simply that humans burn trees.” 
― M. Jackson, While Glaciers Slept: 

"Fortunately, the world’s governments are now fully convinced of the scientific evidence of climate change and the need to take urgent action. . . . "   (From WMO, where a number of countries have contributed videos of weather reports from the year 2050.)

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“Much of the oxygen we breathe comes from plants that died long ago. We can give thanks to these ancestors of our present-pay foliage, but we can't give back to them. We can, however, give forward. . . . When tackling issues such as climate change, the stance of gratitude is a refreshing alternative to guilt or fear as a source of motivation.” 
― Joanna Macy & Chris Johnstone

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Midweek Motif ~ Climate

• World Meteorological Day is held annually on 23 March.
• The World Meteorological Organization (WMO) is the UN system's authoritative voice on the state and behavior of the Earth's atmosphere, its interaction with the oceans, the climate it produces and the resulting distribution of water resources



Member states of the World Meteorological Organization.

• Technically, climate is a set of weather statistics gathered over many years, a summary of tendencies in a region condensed from many spheres: atmosphere, hydrosphere, cryosphere, lithosphere, and biosphere. 
• The science is too complex for me to understand.  It would take poets or novelists to explain it to me, just as they have been explaining the human and political climate to me for years―and the climate is changing.

Your challenge:  In a new poem, use climate or climate change as a thematic element.  As an added challenge―if you wish to accept it―use a specific situation to clarify a political or natural climate change in the past, present or future.

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February

BY MARGARET ATWOOD

Winter. Time to eat fat

and watch hockey. In the pewter mornings, the cat,   

a black fur sausage with yellow

Houdini eyes, jumps up on the bed and tries   

to get onto my head. It’s his

way of telling whether or not I’m dead.

If I’m not, he wants to be scratched; if I am   

He’ll think of something. He settles

on my chest, breathing his breath

of burped-up meat and musty sofas,

purring like a washboard. Some other tomcat,   

not yet a capon, has been spraying our front door,   

declaring war. It’s all about sex and territory,   

which are what will finish us off

. . . . 

(Read the rest HERE at The Poetry Foundaton)
Copyright © 1995 by Margaret Atwood. Source: Morning in the Burned House (1995)

Pura Vida

BY JOHN UPDIKE

(¡Pura vida! —Costa Rican phrase for "O.K." or "Great!")

Such heat! It brings the brain back to its basic blank.

Small, recurrent events become the daily news—

the white-nosed coati treading the cecropia's

bending thin branches like sidewalks in the sky,

the scarlet-rumped tanager flitting like a spark

in the tinder of dank green, the nodding palm leaves

perforated like Jacquard cards in a code of wormholes,

the black hawk skimming nothingness over and over.

What does the world's wide brimming mean, with hunger

the unstated secret, dying the proximate reality?

. . . . 

(Read the rest Here at The Poetry Foundation.)

UN Climate Summit Poem "Dear Matafele Peinem"

by Kathy Jetnil-Kijiner

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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 will be ~ Ninety / The Nineties)