Poets United Midweek Motif ~ Year's End

"A year of ending and beginning, a year of loss and finding and all of you were with me through the storm. I drink your health, your wealth, your fortune for long years to come, and I hope for many more days in which we can gather like this. ~ C.J. Cherryh, Fortress of Eagles

Capricorn zodiac sign, Jantar Mantar, Jaipur, India. 18th century CE.

© Yann Forget / Wikimedia Commons

Year's end is neither an end nor a beginning but a going on, with all the wisdom that experience can instill in us. Cheers to a new year and another chance for us to get it right. ~ Oprah Winfrey

December, fragment of a mosaic 

Archeological Museum of Sousse

Midweek Motif ~ Year's End

I nearly left out the apostrophe to speak of Years Ends, but decided to stick with 2019, this year's end, full of trouble and joy, suspense and certainty.  

Perhaps you will use your new poem to record the details.  Perhaps you will use it to spread cheer and blessings.  Perhaps you will write an ode to rest, and its role in creativity.  

Your Challenge: Let's write to each other in this new poem about the end of 2019.

Bouquet de roses by Suzanne Valadon (1936)

 Year's End
  by Ted Kooser

Now the seasons are closing their files
on each of us, the heavy drawers
full of certificates rolling back
into the tree trunks, a few old papers
flocking away. Someone we loved
has fallen from our thoughts,
making a little, glittering splash
like a bicycle pushed by a breeze.
Otherwise, not much has happened;
we fell in love again, finding
that one red feather on the wind.

from Matsuo Bashō:

I’ve hit the bottom
of my bag of discretion:
year’s end.

another from Matsuo Basho

English version by Lucien Stryk and Takashi Ikemoto

Year’s end,
all corners
of this floating world, swept.

  The Year (1910)                        

          by Ella Wheeler Wilcox                                   

What can be said in New Year rhymes,
That’s not been said a thousand times?
The new years come, the old years go,
We know we dream, we dream we know.
We rise up laughing with the light,
We lie down weeping with the night.
We hug the world until it stings,
We curse it then and sigh for wings.
We live, we love, we woo, we wed,
We wreathe our brides, we sheet our dead.
We laugh, we weep, we hope, we fear,
And that’s the burden of the year.

Burning the Old Year

By Naomi Shihab Nye

 

Letters swallow themselves in seconds.   

Notes friends tied to the doorknob,   

transparent scarlet paper,

sizzle like moth wings,

marry the air.

So much of any year is flammable,   

lists of vegetables, partial poems.   

Orange swirling flame of days,   

so little is a stone.

Where there was something and suddenly isn’t,   

an absence shouts, celebrates, leaves a space.   

I begin again with the smallest numbers.

Quick dance, shuffle of losses and leaves,   

only the things I didn’t do   

crackle after the blazing dies.

"Songs to aging children come / This is one"

Lyrics are HERE

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Please share your new poem using Mr. Linky below 

and visit others in the spirit of the community—

Best wishes for this year's end and the new years to come!

Poets United Midweek Motif ~ Changes

Autumn in Lodhi Garden, New Delhi

I am crooning a Tagore song as I write this prompt ‘Changes’ together with Susan: 

“Fallen leaves, I’m one of you dear.

With much laughter and many a tear

Phagun* chanted the farewell song into my core.”

(*Phagun / Phalgun is one of the last months

of the Bengali calendar.)

This year now rolls into its last month. There is an aroma of change everywhere; in every sphere of life. So it is in our dearest home Poets United. Mary and Sherry left in October, and both Susan and I are taking leave of Midweek Motif this December:

“The poetry of earth is ceasing never:   

On a lone winter evening, when the frost    

    Has wrought a silence, from the stove there shrills   

The Cricket’s song, in warmth increasing ever,   

  And seems to one in drowsiness half lost,   

    The Grasshopper’s among some grassy hills.”

Our last prompt will be 18 December 2019, though we will continue to write and blog our poetry.   We will write more about this change in Rosemary's feature this Friday.  So stay tuned, and stay in tune, too, for your new Wednesday prompt hosts in January 2020.

Much love, Sumana and Susan        

source

Midweek Motif  ~ Changes

  

We try to learn to appreciate change, as it cannot be avoided.  We would have to set life in bronze or stone or amber to preserve it.  Would it then be alive?  Can we then celebrate change, or at least find the words to recognize its power?   Adrienne Rich wrote in "Images for Godard":

 the mind of the poet is changing
the moment of change is the only poem.  

 What do you think?

Here are more poems to inspire you as you find the poetry in change:  

Want the change
 
by Rainer Maria Rilke
English version by Anita Barrows and Joanna Macy

Want the change. Be inspired by the flame
where everything shines as it disappears.
The artist, when sketching, loves nothing so much
as the curve of the body as it turns away.

What locks itself in sameness has congealed.
Is it safer to be gray and numb?
What turns hard becomes rigid
and is easily shattered.

Pour yourself out like a fountain.
Flow into the knowledge that what you are seeking
finishes often at the start, and, with ending, begins.

Every happiness is the child of a separation
it did not think it could survive. And Daphne, becoming a laurel,
dares you to become the wind.

The Journey

by Mary Oliver

One day you finally knew
what you had to do, and began,
though the voices around you
kept shouting
their bad advice – – –
though the whole house
began to tremble
and you felt the old tug
at your ankles.
‘Mend my life!’
each voice cried.
But you didn’t stop.

You knew what you had to do,
though the wind pried
with its stiff fingers
at the very foundations – – –
though their melancholy
was terrible. It was already late
enough, and a wild night,
and the road full of fallen
branches and stones.

But little by little,
as you left their voices behind,
the stars began to burn
through the sheets of clouds,
and there was a new voice,
which you slowly
recognized as your own,
that kept you company
as you strode deeper and deeper
into the world,
determined to do
the only thing you could do – – – determined to save
the only life you could save. 

Trying to Name What Doesn’t Change

By Naomi Shihab Nye
 

Roselva says the only thing that doesn’t change

is train tracks. She’s sure of it.

The train changes, or the weeds that grow up spidery

by the side, but not the tracks.

I’ve watched one for three years, she says,

and it doesn’t curve, doesn’t break, doesn’t grow.

Peter isn’t sure. He saw an abandoned track

near Sabinas, Mexico, and says a track without a train

is a changed track. The metal wasn’t shiny anymore.

The wood was split and some of the ties were gone.

Every Tuesday on Morales Street

butchers crack the necks of a hundred hens.

The widow in the tilted house

spices her soup with cinnamon.

Ask her what doesn’t change.

Stars explode.

The rose curls up as if there is fire in the petals.

The cat who knew me is buried under the bush.

The train whistle still wails its ancient sound

but when it goes away, shrinking back

from the walls of the brain,

it takes something different with it every time.

source

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 / The Moment.)

Poets United Midweek Motif ~ Kindness

“I expect to pass through life but once. If therefore there be any kindness I can show...let me do it now.” 

― William Penn

Placard for kindness, at the People's Climate March (2017).

“Guard well within yourself that treasure, kindness. Know how to give without hesitation, how to lose without regret, how to acquire without meanness.” 

― George Sand

"The magic in this world seems to work in whispers and small kindnesses.” 

― Charles de Lint

“In what terms should we think of these beings, nonhuman yet possessing so very many human-like characteristics? How should we treat them? Surely we should treat them with the same consideration and kindness as we show to other humans; and as we recognize human rights, so too should we recognize the rights of the great apes? Yes.” 

― Jane Goodall

Jane Goodall spent decades studying chimpanzees . . .
From article about National Geographic Documentary "Jane"
11/7/2017 by Jordan Riefe. Photo Courtesy of Goodall Institute. 

Midweek Motif ~ Kindness

• To be "kind" (n) is "to be related."
• To "be kind" (adv) is "to treat each other as lovingly as we would like to be treated."

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These two meanings may depend upon each other, as we tend to be kinder toward those with whom we sense a relationship. 
Or is it the opposite?

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Your Challenge: In a new poem, show us how you know/imagine kindness and its possibility.

Kindness by Naomi Shihab Nye

Before you know what kindness really is
you must lose things,
feel the future dissolve in a moment
like salt in a weakened broth.
What you held in your hand,
what you counted and carefully saved,
all this must go so you know
how desolate the landscape can be
between the regions of kindness.
How you ride and ride
thinking the bus will never stop,
the passengers eating maize and chicken
will stare out the window forever.

Before you learn the tender gravity of kindness
you must travel where the Indian in a white poncho
lies dead by the side of the road.
You must see how this could be you,
how he too was someone
who journeyed through the night with plans
and the simple breath that kept him alive.

Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside,
you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing. 
You must wake up with sorrow.
You must speak to it till your voice
catches the thread of all sorrows
and you see the size of the cloth.
Then it is only kindness that makes sense anymore,
only kindness that ties your shoes
and sends you out into the day to gaze at bread,
only kindness that raises its head
from the crowd of the world to say
It is I you have been looking for,
and then goes with you everywhere
like a shadow or a friend.

Kindness by Sylvia Plath

Kindness glides about my house.

Dame Kindness, she is so nice!

The blue and red jewels of her rings smoke

In the windows, the mirrors

Are filling with smiles.

What is so real as the cry of a child?

A rabbit's cry may be wilder

But it has no soul.

Sugar can cure everything, so Kindness says.

Sugar is a necessary fluid,

Its crystals a little poultice.

O kindness, kindness

Sweetly picking up pieces!

My Japanese silks, desperate butterflies,

May be pinned any minute, anesthetized.

And here you come, with a cup of tea

Wreathed in steam.

The blood jet is poetry,

There is no stopping it.

You hand me two children, two roses.

Kindness
BY YUSEF KOMUNYAKAA

For Carol Rigolot

When deeds splay before us 

precious as gold & unused chances

stripped from the whine-bone,

we know the moment kindheartedness

walks in. Each praise be

echoes us back as the years uncount

themselves, eating salt. Though blood

first shaped us on the climbing wheel,

the human mind lit by the savanna’s

ice star & thistle rose,

your knowing gaze enters a room

& opens the day,

saying we were made for fun.

Even the bedazzled brute knows

when sunlight falls through leaves

across honed knives on the table.

If we can see it push shadows

aside, growing closer, are we less

broken? A barometer, temperature

gauge, a ruler in minus fractions

& pedigrees, a thingmajig,

a probe with an all-seeing eye,

what do we need to measure

kindness, every unheld breath,

every unkind leapyear?

Sometimes a sober voice is enough

to calm the waters & drive away

the false witnesses, saying, Look,

here are the broken treaties Beauty

brought to us earthbound sentinels.

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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 ~ Neighbors )

Poets United Midweek Motif ~ Surprise!

“If you do not expect the unexpected, you will not find it . . . .” 

― Heraclitus

"Expect nothing. Live frugally on surprise." ― Alice Walker

The Muse, Modeled by Nina Longshadow at Opus

Midweek Motif ~  Surprise!

If only life could be serene with no upheavals and few changes in relationships. No surprises, please! But for waking up from the laziness that threatens daily perception? Nothing is better than surprise.

When were you last pleasantly surprised?

Your challenge: Write a new poem with surprise as a recurring motif.  The poem itself need not surprise, but if you can wake us up a little through a pleasant surprise, do!

Surgery

Apparently With No Surprise 

by Emily Dickinson

Apparently with no surprise,
To any happy flower,
The frost beheads it at its play,
In accidental power.
The blond assassin passes on.
The sun proceeds unmoved,
To measure off another day,
For an approving God.

Surprise by Dorothy Parker

My heart went fluttering with fear

Lest you should go, and leave me here

To beat my breast and rock my head

And stretch me sleepless on my bed.

Ah, clear they see and true they say

That one shall weep, and one shall stray

For such is Love's unvarying law....

I never thought, I never saw

That I should be the first to go;

How pleasant that it happened so! 

source

The Words Under the Words

BY NAOMI SHIHAB NYE

for Sitti Khadra, north of Jerusalem

My grandmother’s hands recognize grapes,

the damp shine of a goat’s new skin.

When I was sick they followed me,

I woke from the long fever to find them

covering my head like cool prayers.

My grandmother’s days are made of bread,

a round pat-pat and the slow baking.

She waits by the oven watching a strange car

circle the streets. Maybe it holds her son,

lost to America. More often, tourists,

who kneel and weep at mysterious shrines.

She knows how often mail arrives,

how rarely there is a letter.

When one comes, she announces it, a miracle,

listening to it read again and again

in the dim evening light.

My grandmother’s voice says nothing can surprise her.

Take her the shotgun wound and the crippled baby.

She knows the spaces we travel through,

the messages we cannot send—our voices are short

and would get lost on the journey.

Farewell to the husband’s coat,

the ones she has loved and nourished,

who fly from her like seeds into a deep sky.

They will plant themselves. We will all die.

My grandmother’s eyes say Allah is everywhere, even in death.

When she talks of the orchard and the new olive press,

when she tells the stories of Joha and his foolish wisdoms,

He is her first thought, what she really thinks of is His name.

“Answer, if you hear the words under the words—

otherwise it is just a world with a lot of rough edges,

difficult to get through, and our pockets full of stones.”

source

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 Peace on Earth.)