Poets United Midweek Motif ~ Empowerment

“Don't be satisfied with stories, how things have gone with others. 
Unfold your own myth.” 

― Rumi

"Give a man a fish you feed him for a day, 
teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime."
 source

“Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be?”

― Marianne Williamson, "A Course in Miracles"

From Wikipedia:  

"The term empowerment refers to measures designed to increase the degree of autonomy and self-determination in people and in communities in order to enable them to represent their interests in a responsible and self-determined way, acting on their own authority. It is the process of becoming stronger and more confident, especially in controlling one's life and claiming one's rights. Empowerment as action refers both to the process of self-empowerment and to professional support of people, which enables them to overcome their sense of powerlessness and lack of influence, and to recognize and use their resources.  

"To do work with power."

Source

Midweek Motif ~  Empowerment

I developed this empowerment motif because it's women's history month. While researching it, I discovered that most places in the world have initiatives for the empowerment of social groups such as people of color, youth, women, gender and sexual diversities, and the aging, the disabled, etc. Empowerment is also a huge goal for individuals. Of course, initiatives exist because of ongoing dis-empowerment.  We seek solutions.

Source  
(Forgive me for using this without permission.)

At what are you empowered?  

What has contributed most to your empowerment?  

Where would you like to see more (or less) empowerment?

Your Challenge:  Write a new and strong empowerment poem. (Though I focus on women below, you need not focus on women in your poem.)

won't you celebrate with me

BY LUCILLE CLIFTON

Won't you celebrate with me

what i have shaped into

a kind of life? i had no model.

born in babylon

both nonwhite and woman

what did i see to be except myself?

i made it up

here on this bridge between

starshine and clay,

my one hand holding tight

my other hand; come celebrate

with me that everyday

something has tried to kill me

and has failed.

They shut me up in Prose – (445)

BY EMILY DICKINSON

They shut me up in Prose –

As when a little Girl

They put me in the Closet –

Because they liked me “still”   –

Still! Could themself have peeped –

And seen my Brain – go round –

They might as wise have lodged a Bird

For Treason – in the Pound –

Himself has but to will

And easy as a Star

Look down upon Captivity –

And laugh – No more have I –

Phenomenal Woman

BY MAYA ANGELOU

Pretty women wonder where my secret lies.

I’m not cute or built to suit a fashion model’s size   

But when I start to tell them,

They think I’m telling lies.

I say,

It’s in the reach of my arms,

The span of my hips,   

The stride of my step,   

The curl of my lips.   

I’m a woman

Phenomenally.

Phenomenal woman,   

That’s me.

I walk into a room

Just as cool as you please,   

And to a man,

The fellows stand or

Fall down on their knees.   

Then they swarm around me,

A hive of honey bees.   

I say,

It’s the fire in my eyes,   

And the flash of my teeth,   

The swing in my waist,   

And the joy in my feet.   

I’m a woman

Phenomenally.

Phenomenal woman,

That’s me.

Men themselves have wondered   

What they see in me.

They try so much

But they can’t touch

My inner mystery.

When I try to show them,   

They say they still can’t see.   

I say,

It’s in the arch of my back,   

The sun of my smile,

The ride of my breasts,

The grace of my style.

I’m a woman

Phenomenally.

Phenomenal woman,

That’s me.

Now you understand

Just why my head’s not bowed.   

I don’t shout or jump about

Or have to talk real loud.   

When you see me passing,

It ought to make you proud.

I say,

It’s in the click of my heels,   

The bend of my hair,   

the palm of my hand,   

The need for my care.   

’Cause I’m a woman

Phenomenally.

Phenomenal woman,

That’s me.
͇͇͇

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 ~ Solitude.)

͇͇͇

Poets United Midweek Motif ~ Holiness / Holy Day

A map of major denominations and religions of the world

"The word "holiday" comes from the Old English word hāligdæg (hālig "holy" + dæg "day").  The word originally referred only to special religious days. "

--"Holiday," Wikipedia

The English word "holy" dates back to at least the 11th century with the Old English word hālig, an adjective derived from hāl meaning "whole" and used to mean "uninjured, sound, healthy, entire, complete". The Scottish hale ("health, happiness and wholeness") is the most complete modern form of this Old English root. . . . In non-specialist contexts, the term "holy" is used in a more general way, to refer to someone or something that is associated with a divine power, such as water used for baptism.

--"Sacred," Wikipedia

"The holidays are only holy if we make them so."

-- Marianne Williamson

“It is well to have specifically holy places, and things, and days, for, without these focal points or reminders, the belief that all is holy and "big with God" will soon dwindle into a mere sentiment. But if these holy places, things, and days cease to remind us, if they obliterate our awareness that all ground is holy and every bush (could we but perceive it) a Burning Bush, then the hallows begin to do harm.” 

― C.S. Lewis

🔥 🔥 🔥

Midweek Motif ~  Holiness
Holy Day

Look at the Interfaith Calendar of World Religions for April 2017. There are so many Holy Days!   And this is not counting Days of Rest. Nor the holidays of First Peoples:  

·        1

o   Lazarus Saturday - Orthodox Christian

·        2

o   Palm Sunday - Orthodox Christian

·        5

o   Ramanavami ** - Hindu

·        9

o   Palm Sunday- Christian

·        10

o   Mahavir Jayanti ** - Jain

·        11

o   Lord's Evening Meal - Jehovah's Witness Christian

o   Hanuman Jayanti - Hindu

·        11-14

o   Theravadin Mew Year ** - Buddhist

·        11-18

o   Pesach (Passover) * - Jewish

·        13

o   Maundy Thursday - Christian

·        14

o   Holy Friday - Orthodox Christian

o   Baisakhi (Vaisakhi) - Sikh

o   Good Friday - Christian

·        16

o   Easter - Christian

o   Pascha (Easter) - Orthodox Christian

·        21

o   First Day of Ridvan * - Baha'i

·        23

o   St. George's Day - Christian

o   Yom HaShoah * - Jewish

·        24

o   Lailat al Miraj * - Islam

·        29

o   Ninth Day of Ridvan * - Baha'i

·        30

o   St. James the Great Day - Orthodox Christian

Maybe you celebrate a Holy day, or maybe you are curious about one you don't celebrate.  Maybe you, like me, hold all days as holy--or maybe no days at all.  My question is:

 What is "Holiness"?  or 

What Makes a Day Holy?

Your Challenge:  Write a new poem about a specific Holy Day or about the concept of Holiness.  

Holy as the Day is Spent

  

Excerpt from Riders on the Back of Silence

Related Poem Content Details

BY CYRUS CASSELLS

(Brooklyn, the present day)

. . . . 

As a boy, my old-world aunts and uncles

would weep when I entered the room:

What did I have to do with sadness?

Their cryptic tears

and purse-tucked Kleenex

were my own tantalizing

Hardy Boys case to crack.

Gradually, as a junior detective, I grasped

how much I resembled

an uncle lost in the war,

and like the savvy, querying boy

at the Passover Seder

become a scrupulous man,

an inquisitive reporter,

I set out to track my look-alike’s,

my family’s wartime destiny—

What my father marshaled against,

what my mother endured,

the unspoken, the unspeakable,

became my mission:

though I was born in a venomless

time and suburb,

phantoms, chimeras breathed

in our never-quite-here-and-now house,

secret calendars of fire:

Mother, I dreamed we were

riders on the back of silence,

the wild unsaid beneath us:

horse, whale,

behemoth.

We never spoke of the war.

So with stark reading,

a well-thumbed

Diary of Anne Frank,

I resolved to imagine

pitiless showers,

whips and watchtowers

of brute commanders,

their Gypsy-less, Jew-less,

jerry-rigged heaven.

(Read the Rest HERE.)

The Easter Flower 

by Claude McKay

Far from this foreign Easter damp and chilly
My soul steals to a pear-shaped plot of ground,
Where gleamed the lilac-tinted Easter lily
Soft-scented in the air for yards around;

Alone, without a hint of guardian leaf!
Just like a fragile bell of silver rime,
It burst the tomb for freedom sweet and brief
In the young pregnant year at Eastertime;

And many thought it was a sacred sign,
And some called it the resurrection flower;
And I, a pagan, worshiped at its shrine,
Yielding my heart unto its perfumed power.

Excerpt from At the River Clarion

by Mary Oliver

I don’t know who God is exactly.

But I’ll tell you this.

I was sitting in the river named Clarion, on a water splashed stone

and all afternoon I listened to the voices of the river talking.

Whenever the water struck a stone it had something to say,

and the water itself, and even the mosses trailing under the water.

And slowly, very slowly, it became clear to me what they were saying.

Said the river I am part of holiness.

And I too, said the stone. And I too, whispered the moss beneath the water.

I’d been to the river before, a few times.

Don’t blame the river that nothing happened quickly.

You don’t hear such voices in an hour or a day.

You don’t hear them at all if selfhood has stuffed your ears.

And it’s difficult to hear anything anyway, through all the traffic, the ambition.

. . . . 

(Read the rest HERE)

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 ~ 

A Grain of Sand)