Poets United Midweek Motif ~ Peace

Antonio Balestra, Justice and Peace Embracing, ca. 1700

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

source

If you cannot find peace within yourself, you will never find it anywhere else.

― Marvin Gaye

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.

― Carrie Fisher

Peaceable Kingdom by Edward Hicks (1834)

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Midweek Motif ~ Peace

Yearning for peace, I ask:

Where do we have peace in our lives?  How can we ~ as humans, as poets ~ help peace spread?  To whom would we give a peace prize?

Your Challenge:  Make peace the mood and motif of your new poem. Here is more food for thought:

List of all Nobel Peace Prize Laureates

List of all Nobel Peace Prize awarded organizations

John Lennon peace mural wall, Praha.(1993)

        

Grief There Is And Death

by Rabindranath Tagore, 

(Recipient of the 1913 Nobel Prize in Literature)

          (translated by Sumana Roy)

Grief there is, and Death; Partings char.

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.

        (The Song is Here sung by Lopamudra Mitra)

"Possibilities" by Maria Wisława Anna Szymborska

(Recipient of the 1996 Nobel Prize in Literature.)

Pine Forest 

by Gabriela Mistral

(Recipient of the 1945 Nobel Prize in Literature.)

Let us go now into the forest.

Trees will pass by your face,

and I will stop and offer you to them,

but they cannot bend down.

The night watches over its creatures,

except for the pine trees that never change:

the old wounded springs that spring

blessed gum, eternal afternoons.

If they could, the trees would lift you

and carry you from valley to valley,

and you would pass from arm to arm,

a child running

from father to father.

For You

by Carl Sandburg

The peace of great doors be for you.
Wait at the knobs, at the panel oblongs.
Wait for the great hinges.

The peace of great churches be for you,
Where the players of loft pipe organs
Practice old lovely fragments, alone.

The peace of great books be for you,
Stains of pressed clover leaves on pages,
Bleach of the light of years held in leather.

The peace of great prairies be for you.
Listen among windplayers in cornfields,
The wind learning over its oldest music.

The peace of great seas be for you.
Wait on a hook of land, a rock footing
For you, wait in the salt wash.

The peace of great mountains be for you,
The sleep and the eyesight of eagles,
Sheet mist shadows and the long look across.

The peace of great hearts be for you,

Valves of the blood of the sun,

Pumps of the strongest wants we cry.

The peace of great silhouettes be for you,
Shadow dancers alive in your blood now,
Alive and crying, “Let us out, let us out.”

The peace of great changes be for you.
Whisper, Oh beginners in the hills.
Tumble, Oh cubs—tomorrow belongs to you.

The peace of great loves be for you.
Rain, soak these roots; wind, shatter the dry rot.
Bars of sunlight, grips of the earth, hug these.

The peace of great ghosts be for you,
Phantoms of night-gray eyes, ready to go
To the fog-star dumps, to the fire-white doors.

Yes, the peace of great phantoms be for you,
Phantom iron men, mothers of bronze,
Keepers of the lean clean breeds.

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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 "Rising Above."

Poets United Midweek Motif ~ Mercy

(. . . because this song insisted on being included.)

“The world will give you that once in awhile, a brief timeout; 

the boxing bell rings and you go to your corner, 

where somebody dabs mercy on your beat-up life.” 
― Sue Monk Kidd, The Secret Life of Bees:

The quality of mercy is not strain'd.

It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven

Upon the place beneath. It is twice blest:

It blesseth him that gives, and him that takes.

'Tis mightiest in the mightiest; it becomes

The throned monarch better than his crown.

― William Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice

http://izquotes.com/quote/326102

Midweek Motif ~ Mercy

St. Francis in his famous prayer-poem said "where there is injury let me sow pardon."  

Do we, can we, should we?  

If I had the power to be merciful on a grand scale, I would take in cities of refugees and make sure people who worked all their lives were financially secure to retire and . . . .  I would be the mouse taking the thorn out of the lion's paw.   If only.

Your Challenge: Write a new poem on 

an experience of mercy.  

(Would you believe I wrote this prompt and the next one 
before the attacks in Baghdad and Paris?  
Walk in safety, Poets United, and 
as for words?  Don't hold back.)

http://izquotes.com/quote/206082

Excerpt from Time as Memory as Story by  SIMON J. ORTIZ

                        Let’s say it’s half a century later.

                        Let’s say it’s never too late.

                        Let’s say Skull Valley.

                        Let’s say.

                        Let’s say it’s half a century later.

                        Let’s say it’s never too late.

                        Let’s say Skull Valley.

                        Let’s say.

Time has no mercy. It’s there. It stays still or it moves.

And you’re there with it. Staying still or moving with it.

I think it moves. And we move with it. And keep moving.

Eleven years old and soon to be in fifth grade. That’s time.

Boys’ time. Who knows what time it is but them. Eternally.

No one knows time better than they. Always and forever.

Our family. Mama, me, Angie, Gilbert, Earl, Louise.

Kids. Daddy working in Skull Valley for . . .

. . . . 

(Read the rest HERE at the Poetry Foundation.)

(This song insisted on being included, too.)

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

in the spirit of the community.

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(Next week, November 25th, is the International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women.  Find Information HERE and many other places including Wikipedia.  I just read about Sheroes, a cafe near the Taj Mahal run by victims of acid attacks. Let's make the theme, the next Midweek Motif SURVIVAL.     Thanks, Susan)