Poets United Midweek Motif ~ Evidence/Clues

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“There is always a pleasure in unravelling a mystery, in catching at the gossamer clue which will guide to certainty.” 

― Elizabeth Gaskell, Mary Barton

"Singularity is almost invariably a clue. The more featureless and commonplace a crime is, the more difficult is it to bring it home."

― Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

Midweek Motif ~ Evidence/Clues

I nearly called this prompt "reading the signs"~so go with that if you wish.   Clues might be more fun, and lots and lots about evidence is in the news these days.  Do we seek these signs, clues, and evidence "to create order out of chaos" as Will Shortz says (see quote above)?  Or are we passing the time in game mode, entertaining ourselves? 

Your Challenge:  Write a new poem with one or more signs, clues, or pieces of evidence in it ~ and express where they lead.

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Against the Evidence

BY DAVID IGNATOW

As I reach to close each book

lying open on my desk, it leaps up   

to snap at my fingers. My legs

won’t hold me, I must sit down.

My fingers pain me

where the thick leaves snapped together   

at my touch.

                       All my life

I’ve held books in my hands

like children, carefully turning

their pages and straightening out   

their creases. I use books

almost apologetically. I believe

I often think their thoughts for them.   

Reading, I never know where theirs leave off   

and mine begin. I am so much alone   

in the world, I can observe the stars   

or study the breeze, I can count the steps   

on a stair on the way up or down,   

and I can look at another human being   

and get a smile, knowing

it is for the sake of politeness.

Nothing must be said of estrangement   

among the human race and yet

nothing is said at all

because of that.

But no book will help either.

I stroke my desk,

its wood so smooth, so patient and still.   

I set a typewriter on its surface

and begin to type

to tell myself my troubles.

Against the evidence, I live by choice.

from

 Akiba

BY MURIEL RUKEYSER

THE WAY OUT (an excerpt)

The night is covered with signs. The body and face of man,

with signs, and his journeys.     Where the rock is split

and speaks to the water;     the flame speaks to the cloud;

the red splatter, abstraction, on the door

speaks to the angel and the constellations.

The grains of sand on the sea-floor speak at last to the noon.

And the loud hammering of the land behind

speaks ringing up the bones of our thighs, the hoofs,

we hear the hoofs over the seethe of the sea.

All night down the centuries, have heard, music of passage.

Music of one child carried into the desert;

firstborn forbidden by law of the pyramid.

Drawn through the water with the water-drawn people

led by the water-drawn man to the smoke mountain.

The voice of the world speaking, the world covered by signs,

the burning, the loving, the speaking, the opening.

Strong throat of sound from the smoking mountain.

Still flame, the spoken singing of a young child.

The meaning beginning to move, which is the song.

Music of those who have walked out of slavery.

Into that journey where all things speak to all things

refusing to accept the curse, and taking

for signs the signs of all things, the world, the body

which is part of the soul, and speaks to the world,

all creation being created in one image, creation.

This is not the past walking into the future,

the walk is painful, into the present, the dance

not visible as dance until much later.

These dancers are discoverers of God.

 . . . . 

(Read the rest of this amazing poem, and listen to the poet's recording HERE.)

How I Learned Bliss

BY OLIVER DE LA PAZ

I spied everything. The North Dakota license,

the “Baby on Board” signs, dead raccoons, and deer carcasses.

The Garfields clinging to car windows—the musky traces of old coffee.

I was single-minded in the buzz saw tour I took through

the flatlands of the country to get home. I just wanted to get there.

Never mind the antecedent. I had lost stations miles ago

and was living on cassettes and caffeine. Ahead, brushstrokes

of smoke from annual fires. Only ahead to the last days of summer

and to the dying theme of youth. How pitch-perfect

the tire-on-shoulder sound was to mask the hiss of the tape deck ribbons.

Everything. Perfect. As Wyoming collapses over the car

like a wave. And then another mile marker. Another.

How can I say this more clearly? It was like opening a heavy book,

letting the pages feather themselves and finding a dried flower.

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 ~ the Wall.)

Poets United Midweek Motif ~ Beginnings

               

Egg

White Hen And Chickens by Joseph Crawhall III 

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“Since when," he asked, "Are the first line and last line of any poem where the poem begins and ends?”  ― Seamus Heaney

                                                          

“The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.” 

― Lao Tzu                    

#1619 

Not knowing when the Dawn will come,

I open every Door,

Or has it Feathers, like a Bird,

Or Billows, like a Shore—

― Emily Dickinson

Beautiful World - In The Beginning

Midweek Motif ~ Beginnings

The question of "how to begin" has generated books upon books in every game and every field, and the answers are still not exhausted.  Yet things begin, and often before the visible and public (or private) beginning.  Consider how a flower opens.  Would you count its beginning in the bud?  in the seed?  in the idea of  a flower?  

Your Challenge: In your new poem, trace a thing, event, or action back to its true or imagined beginnings.

Casting on

The Tyger BY WILLIAM BLAKE

Tyger Tyger, burning bright, 

In the forests of the night; 

What immortal hand or eye, 

Could frame thy fearful symmetry? 

In what distant deeps or skies. 

Burnt the fire of thine eyes? 

On what wings dare he aspire? 

What the hand, dare seize the fire? 

And what shoulder, & what art, 

Could twist the sinews of thy heart? 

And when thy heart began to beat, 

What dread hand? & what dread feet? 

What the hammer? what the chain, 

In what furnace was thy brain? 

What the anvil? what dread grasp, 

Dare its deadly terrors clasp! 

When the stars threw down their spears 

And water'd heaven with their tears: 

Did he smile his work to see? 

Did he who made the Lamb make thee? 

Tyger Tyger burning bright, 

In the forests of the night: 

What immortal hand or eye, 

Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?

excerpt  from Elegy in Joy  By Muriel Rukeyser

We tell beginnings: for the flesh and the answer,
or the look, the lake in the eye that knows,
for the despair that flows down in widest rivers,
cloud of home; and also the green tree of grace,
all in the leaf, in the love that gives us ourselves.

The word of nourishment passes through the women,
soldiers and orchards rooted in constellations,
white towers, eyes of children: 
saying in time of war What shall we feed?
I cannot say the end.

Nourish beginnings, let us nourish beginnings.
Not all things are blest, but the
seeds of all things are blest.
The blessing is in the seed.

This moment, this seed, this wave of the sea, this look, this instant of love.
Years over wars and an imagining of peace.  Or the expiation journey
toward peace which is many wishes flaming together,
fierce pure life, the many-living home.
Love that gives us ourselves, in the world known to all
new techniques for the healing of the wound,
and the unknown world.  One life, or the faring stars.

Start Close In

by David Whyte

Start close in,
don’t take the second step
or the third,
start with the first
thing
close in,
the step
you don’t want to take.




. . . . 
(Read the rest HERE.)























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"Large streams from little fountains flow, 

Tall oaks from little acorns grow."





(D. Everett in The Columbian Orator, 1797)





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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 ~ Vision.)

Poets United Midweek Motif ~ Masks

Golden masks excavated in Kalmakareh, Lorestan, Iran.

“No man, for any considerable period, can wear one face to himself and another to the multitude, without finally getting bewildered as to which may be the true.” 

― Nathaniel Hawthorne

“I believe in my mask-- The man I made up is me

 I believe in my dance-- And my destiny” 

― Sam Shepard

“A mask tells us more than a face.” 

― Oscar Wilde

Three pictures of the same female noh mask 

Midweek Motif ~ Masks

Masks. Can't live with them and can't live without them! And in addition to our personal masks, there are also cultural and ritual masks that are precious to the faithful and also to collectors.

Can we tell when someone is undisguised? 

Do we prefer people to maintain the mask?

Your Challenge: In a new poem,
unmask a mask, reveal its use and properties, or tell its story.

Masks from Many Cultures - Screener

We Wear the Mask 

by Paul Laurence Dunbar

We wear the mask that grins and lies,
It hides our cheeks and shades our eyes,--
This debt we pay to human guile;
With torn and bleeding hearts we smile,
And mouth with myriad subtleties.

Why should the world be overwise,
In counting all our tears and sighs?
Nay, let them only see us, while
We wear the mask.

We smile, but, O great Christ, our cries
To thee from tortured souls arise.
We sing, but oh the clay is vile
Beneath our feet, and long the mile;
But let the world dream otherwise,

We wear the mask!

Maya Angelou, We Wear The Mask

The Poem as Mask
by Muriel Rukeyser




Orpheus

When I wrote of the women in their dances and 
      wildness, it was a mask,
on their mountain, gold-hunting, singing, in orgy,
it was a mask; when I wrote of the god,
fragmented, exiled from himself, his life, the love gone
      down with song,
it was myself, split open, unable to speak, in exile from
      myself.
   
There is no mountain, there is no god, there is memory
of my torn life, myself split open in sleep, the rescued
      child
beside me among the doctors, and a word
of rescue from the great eyes.

No more masks! No more mythologies!

Now, for the first time, the god lifts his hand,
the fragments join in me with their own music.








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Source
WWI Gas Masks



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 ~ Finding a Sanctuary.)