Poets United Midweek Motif ~ Saints

Some say this world of trouble

Is the only one we need

But I’m waiting for that morning

When the new world is revealed.

Oh, when the saints go marching in,

When the saints go marching in,

Oh Lord, I want to be in that number,

When the saints go marching in!

(quote from a Louis Armstrong's version.)

Wheel of Fortune with scenes from
the life of Saint Theophilus the Penitent. 

Midweek Motif ~ Saints 

Today, our minds may be on saints (All Saints Day), our dearly departed (Day of the Dead), or living persons we venerate, or not.  Who is (or was) a saintly presence to you?  How does the idea of sainthood enter your life?

Your Challenge:  In a new poem, narrate an encounter with a saint.

Rabindranath Tagore and Gandhi in 1940.

👼

Saint’s Day Triolet: Saint Anthony

BY DEBORAH PAREDEZ

When no one else would listen, Saint Anthony

preached seaward, his words fishnet for the lost

souls of the heretics. Caught up in despair, we plea

to the one who will listen: Saint Anthony,

please return Tía’s teeth or the misplaced key 

to our bolted hopes. Patron retriever of all we’ve tossed 

when no one else would. Listen, Saint Anthony,

teach us to steward this world, all our netted loss.

(Used by permission.)

Saint Judas

James Arlington Wright

When I went out to kill myself, I caught

A pack of hoodlums beating up a man.

Running to spare his suffering, I forgot

My name, my number, how my day began,

How soldiers milled around the garden stone

And sang amusing songs; how all that day

Their javelins measured crowds; how I alone

Bargained the proper coins, and slipped away.

Banished from heaven, I found this victim beaten,

Stripped, kneed, and left to cry. Dropping my rope

Aside, I ran, ignored the uniforms:

Then I remembered bread my flesh had eaten,

The kiss that ate my flesh. Flayed without hope,

I held the man for nothing in my arms.

St. Francis and the Sow, Mollie Hosmer-Dillard (2012)
(Used with Permission)

👼

excerpt from Saint Francis and the Sow

BY GALWAY KINNELL

. . . . 

as Saint Francis 

put his hand on the creased forehead 

of the sow, and told her in words and in touch   

blessings of earth on the sow, and the sow   

began remembering all down her thick length,   

from the earthen snout all the way 

through the fodder and slops to the spiritual curl of the tail,   

from the hard spininess spiked out from the spine   

down through the great broken heart 

to the sheer blue milken dreaminess spurting and shuddering   

from the fourteen teats into the fourteen mouths sucking and blowing beneath them: 

the long, perfect loveliness of sow.

The Singing Girl

by Joyce Kilmer      (For the Rev. Edward F. Garesche, S.J.)

There was a little maiden
In blue and silver drest,
She sang to God in Heaven
And God within her breast.

It flooded me with pleasure,
It pierced me like a sword,
When this young maiden sang: "My soul
Doth magnify the Lord."
The stars sing all together
And hear the angels sing,
But they said they had never heard
So beautiful a thing.

Saint Mary and Saint Joseph,
And Saint Elizabeth,
Pray for us poets now
And at the hour of death.

👼


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 ~  Silence.

Poets United Midweek Motif ~ Tree(s)

Olive Trees with the Alpilles in the Background (1889), Vincent van Gogh

Poets United Midweek Motif ~ Tree(s)

Tree(s): What was/is a tree to you?  
Is there one you miss or wish to meet someday?

Find a way to answer in a poem.

I illustrated this prompt with a selection of Vincent van Gogh's  paintings of trees. Feel free to write to paintings and photographs--but provide a link to your source if you do.

~

Trees and Undergrowth (1887), Vincent van Gogh

     Here's a poem you may know: 

Trees

BY JOYCE KILMER

I think that I shall never see

A poem lovely as a tree.

A tree whose hungry mouth is prest

Against the earth’s sweet flowing breast;

A tree that looks at God all day,

And lifts her leafy arms to pray;

A tree that may in Summer wear

A nest of robins in her hair;

Upon whose bosom snow has lain;

Who intimately lives with rain.

Poems are made by fools like me,

But only God can make a tree.

                                        Source: Poetry (August 1913).

Pink peach trees ("Souvenir de Mauve"), Vincent van Gogh (1888)

The Banyan Tree by Rabindranath Tagore

O you shaggy-headed banyan tree standing on the bank of the pond,
have you forgotten the little chile, like the birds that have
nested in your branches and left you?
Do you not remember how he sat at the window and wondered at
the tangle of your roots and plunged underground?
The women would come to fill their jars in the pond, and your
huge black shadow would wriggle on the water like sleep struggling
to wake up.
Sunlight danced on the ripples like restless tiny shuttles
weaving golden tapestry.
Two ducks swam by the weedy margin above their shadows, and
the child would sit still and think.
He longed to be the wind and blow through your resting
branches, to be your shadow and lengthen with the day on the water,
to be a bird and perch on your topmost twig, and to float like
those ducks among the weeds and shadows.

Undergrowth with Two Figures (1890),  Vincent van Gogh

From: A Tree Telling of Orpheus by Denise Levertov

White dawn. Stillness.When the rippling began
I took it for sea-wind, coming to our valley with rumors of salt, of treeless horizons. But the white fog
didn't stir; the leaves of my brothers remained outstretched, unmoving.
Yet the rippling drew nearer – and then my own outermost branches began to tingle, almost as if
fire had been lit below them, too close, and their twig-tips were drying and curling.
Yet I was not afraid, only deeply alert.
I was the first to see him, for I grew out on the
pasture slope, beyond the forest.
. . . .   (Read the rest HERE at All Poetry.)

Cypresses (1889), Vincent van Gogh

For those who are new here:  

1. Post your Tree 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 One Day in a life ...)

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