“When you’re
drowning, you don’t say ‘I would be incredibly pleased if someone would have
the foresight to notice me drowning and come and help,’ you just scream. — John Lennon
Midweek
Motif ~ Scream
In
his diary in an entry headed "Nice 22 January 1892", Edvard Munch
wrote:
“I
was walking along the road with two friends – the sun was setting –
suddenly the sky turned blood red – I paused, feeling exhausted, and
leaned on the fence – there was blood and tongues of fire above the
blue-black fjord and the city – my friends walked on, and I stood there
trembling with anxiety – and I sensed an infinite scream passing through
nature.
He
later described his inspiration for the image:
One
evening I was walking along a path, the city was on one side and the fjord
below. I felt tired and ill. I stopped and looked out over the fjord—the sun
was setting, and the clouds turning blood red. I sensed a scream passing
through nature; it seemed to me that I heard the scream. I painted this
picture, painted the clouds as actual blood. The color shrieked. This became
The Scream.”
Have
you ever come to that point when you wanted to scream at you or at the world or
have you ever come across anyone, anything, screaming?
So
let us see, write, read and hear some screaming today J
Lightening
by
Matsuo Basho
Lightening-
The
heron’s cry
Stabs
the darkness
To A Daughter Leaving Home
by
Linda Pastan
When
I taught you
at eight to ride
a bicycle, loping along
beside you
as you wobbled away
on two round wheels,
my own mouth rounding
in surprise when you pulled
ahead down the curved
path of the park,
I kept waiting
for the thud
of your crash as I
sprinted to catch up,
while you grew
smaller, more breakable
with distance,
pumping, pumping
for your life, screaming
with laughter,
the hair flapping
behind you like a
handkerchief waving
goodbye.
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 ~ Colour / Color)
Mercy and truth meet together: righteousness and peace kiss each other. Psalm 85:10
If you look at human society, it is very easy, of course, to compare our warfare and territoriality with the chimpanzee. But that's only one side of what we do. We also trade, we intermarry, we allow each other to travel through our territory. There's an enormous amount of cooperation. Indeed, among hunter-gatherers, peace is common 90 percent of the time, and war takes place only a small part of the time. . . . Jane Goodall
Without peace, all other dreams vanish and are reduced to ashes. Jawaharlal Nehru
She wanted so to be tranquil, to be someone who took walks in the late-afternoon sun, listening to the birds and crickets and feeling the whole world breathe. Instead, she lived in her head like a madwoman locked in a tower, hearing the wind howling through her hair and waiting for someone to come and rescue her from feeling things so deeply that her bones burned.
Yet Peace and Bliss and the Infinite stir. Flows life ceaselessly, beam the sun, moon and stars In striking tints and hues Spring shows up in bowers. Waves ebb waves rise. Wilt flowers and bloom buds. Decays not, ends not, never ever depletes, Unto that wholeness the mind begs a retreat.
“Every act of
rebellion expresses nostalgia for innocence and an appeal to the essence of
being.”— Albert Camus
“I was right when
I said I’d never look back. It hurts too much, it drags at your heart till you
can’t ever do anything else except look back.”— Margaret Mitchell, Gone With The
Wind
“Moments never
stay, whether or not you ask them, they do not care, no moment cares, and the
ones you wish could stretch out like a hammock for you to lie in, well, those
moments leave the quickest and take everything good with them, little burglers,
those moments, those hours, those days you loved the most.”— Catherine Lacey,
Nobody Is Ever Missing
Midweek Motif
~ Nostalgia
The word
“nostalgia” comes from two Greek roots, nostos
meaning ‘return home’ and algia
‘longing’. However neither poetry nor politics birthed the term, rather it came
from ‘medicine’. In the seventeenth century nostalgia was considered as a
curable disease, like a common cold.
Nostalgia is a
longing for a Place as well as for a Time.
We are ‘back to
the good old days’ then. The feeling is almost, past was ‘Paradise’ compared to the ‘Fallen’
present. Is that so?
But who can deny
that we keep a tender, gentle feeling for the long past as we age? Shortcomings
of the past find our forgiving eyes. Time distance has a role to play may be.
Whether good or
bad, we are dealing today with long past. Let’s weave our words with the thread
of deep yearning for the bygone days of our experiences.
Yesterday all my troubles….
by John Lennon
and Paul McCartney
Yesterday all my
troubles seemed so far away.
Now it looks as
though they’re here to stay.
Oh, I believe in
yesterday.
Suddenly I’m not
half the man I used to be.
There’s a shadow
hanging over me.
Oh yesterday came
suddenly.
Why she had to
go, I don’t know, she wouldn’t say.
I said something
wrong, now I long for yesterday.
Yesterday love
was such an easy game to play.
Now I need a
place to hide away.
Oh, I believe in
yesterday.
Why she had to
go, I don’t know, she wouldn’t say.
I said something
wrong, now I long for yesterday.
Yesterday love
was such an easy game to play.
Now I need a
place to hide away.
Oh, I believe in
yesterday.
Nostalgia
by Billy Collins
Remember the 1340’s?
We were doing a dance called the Catapult.
You always wore
brown, the color craze of the decade,
and I was draped
in one of those capes that were popular,
the ones with
unicorns and pomegranates in needlework.
Everyone would
pause for beer and onions in the afternoon,
and at night we
would play a game called “Find the Cow.”
Everything was
hand-lettered then, not like today.
Where has the
summer of 1572 gone? Brocade and sonnet
Marathons were
the rage. We used to dress up in the flags
Of rival baronies
and conquer one another in cold rooms of stone.
Out on the dance
floor we were all doing the Struggle
while your sister
practiced the Daphne all alone in her room.
We borrowed the
jargon of farries for our slang.
These days
language seems transparent a badly broken code.
The 1790’s will
never come again. Childhood was big.
People would take
walks to the very tops of hills
and write down
what they saw in their journals without speaking.
Our collars were
high and our hats were extremely soft.
We would surprise
each other with alphabets made of twigs.
It was a
wonderful time to be alive, or even dead.
I am very fond of
the period between 1815 and 1821.
Europe trembled
while we sat still for our portraits.
And I would love
to return to 1901 if only for a moment,
Time enough to
wind up a music box and do a few dance steps,
or shoot me back
to 1922 or 1941, or at least let me
recapture the
serenity of last month when we picked
berries and
glided through afternoons in a canoe.
Even this morning
would be an improvement over the present
I was in the
garden then, surrounded by the hum of bees
and the Latin
names of flowers, watching the early light
flash off the
slanted windows of the greenhouse
and silver the limbs
on the rows of dark hemlocks.
As usual, I was
thinking about the moments of the past
letting my memory
rush over them like water
rushing over the
stones on the bottom of a stream.
I was even thinking
a little about the future, that place
