Poets United Midweek Motif ~ Forgiveness

 

“Always forgive your enemies – nothing annoys them so much.”— Oscar Wilde

SOURCE

“I learned a long time ago that some people would rather die than forgive. It’s a strange truth, but forgiveness is a painful and difficult process. It’s not something that happens overnight. It’s an evolution of the heart.”— Sue Monk Kidd

Midweek Motif ~ Forgiveness

Sorry is the best word to earn happiness and peace if we are the wrong doer. What if when we are the victim? Is it easy to say, ‘to err is human, to forgive divine?’ Is forgiving someone our weakness or strength? Has the word ever posed any challenge in your life?

We are all ears.

Well, let me tell you secretly my heart sincerely yearns for the nemesis of political crooks.

Here are some Forgiveness poems for you:

He Strained My Faith

by Emily Dickinson

He strained my faith —
Did he find it supple?
Shook my strong trust —
Did it then — yield?

Hurled my belief —
But — did he shatter — it?
Racked — with suspense —
Not a nerve failed!

Wrung me — with Anguish —
But I never doubted him —
‘Tho’ for what wrong
He did never say —

Stabbed — while I sued
His sweet forgiveness —
Jesus — it’s your little “John”!
Don’t you know — me?

a total stranger one black day

by E.E. Cummings

a total stranger one black day

knocked living the hell out of me--

who found forgiveness hard because

my(as it happened)self he was

-but now that fiend and i are such

Immortal friend the other’s each

Do Not Be Ashamed

by Wendell Berry

You will be walking some night
in the comfortable dark of your yard
and suddenly a great light will shine
round about you, and behind you
will be a wall you never saw before.
It will be clear to you suddenly
that you were about to escape,
and that you are guilty: you misread
the complex instructions, you are not
a member, you lost your card
or never had one. And you will know
that they have been there all along,
their eyes on your letters and books,
their hands in your pockets,
their ears wired to your bed.
Though you have done nothing shameful,
they will want you to be ashamed.
They will want you to kneel and weep
and say you should have been like them.
And once you say you are ashamed,
reading the page they hold out to you,
then such light as you have made
in your history will leave you.
They will no longer need to pursue you.
You will pursue them, begging forgiveness,
and they will not forgive you.
There is no power against them.
It is only candor that is aloof from them,
only an inward clarity, unashamed,
that they cannot reach. Be ready.
When their light has picked you out
and their questions are asked, say to them:
“I am not ashamed.” A sure horizon
will come around you. The heron will rise
in his evening flight from the hilltop.

The Rest

by Margaret Atwood

The rest of us watch from beyond the fence
as the woman moves with her jagged stride
into her pain as if into a slow race.
We see her body in motion
but hear no sounds, or we hear
sounds but no language; or we know
it is not a language we know
yet. We can see her clearly
but for her it is running in black smoke.
The cluster of cells in her swelling
like porridge boiling, and bursting,
like grapes, we think. Or we think of
explosions in mud; but we know nothing.
All around us the trees
and the grasses light up with forgiveness,
so green and at this time
of the year healthy.
We would like to call something
out to her. Some form of cheering.
There is pain but no arrival at anything.

Please share your new poem using Mr. Linky below and visit others in the spirit of the community—

(Next week Sanaa’s Midweek Motif will be ~ A Million Years Howl When Voices Whisper Among The Trees )

Poets United Midweek Motif ~ Looking at Stars

 

“We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.”— Oscar Wilde

SOURCE

“Look up at the stars and not down at your feet. Try to make sense of what you see, and wonder about what makes the universe exist. Be curious.”— Stephen Hawking

Midweek Motif ~ Looking at Stars

Are you a star gazer? If not better be one and gift us a few lines about your experience.

The moment you look up you’re getting physically connected to these ancient pinpricks of light. Some of these distant and tiny patches of light may not be existing any more. What do they tell you?

It is a journey, poets often take to arrive at an amazing destination and fill us with wonder.

Some stargazing poems:

240           

by Emily Dickinson

Ah, Moon—and Star!
You are very far—
But were no one
Farther than you—
Do you think I'd stop
For a Firmament—
Or a Cubit—or so?

I could borrow a Bonnet
Of the Lark—
And a Chamois' Silver Boot—
And a stirrup of an Antelope—
And be with you—Tonight!

But, Moon, and Star,
Though you're very far—
There is one—farther than you—
He—is more than a firmament—from Me—
So I can never go! 

Stars, I Have Seen Them Fall

by A.E. Housman

Stars, I have seen them fall,
But when they drop and die
No star is lost at all
From all the star-sown sky.
The toil of all that be
Helps not the primal fault;
It rains into the sea,
And still the sea is salt. 

The Embankment

by T.E. Hulme

Once, in finesse of fiddles found I ecstasy,

In the flash of gold heels on the hard pavement.

Now see I

That warmth’s the very stuff of poesy.

Oh, God. Make small

The old star-eaten blanket of the sky,

That I may fold it round me and in comfort lie.

Stars Over Dordogne

by Sylvia Plath

Stars are dropping thick as stones into the twiggy
Picket of trees whose silhouette is darker
Than the dark of the sky because it is quite starless.
The woods are a well. The stars drop silently.
They seem large, yet they drop, and no gap is visible.
Nor do they send up fires where they fall
Or any signal of distress or anxiousness.
They are eaten immediately by the pines.

Where I am at home, only the sparsest stars
Arrive at twilight, and then after some effort.
And they are wan, dulled by much travelling.
The smaller and more timid never arrive at all
But stay, sitting far out, in their own dust.
They are orphans. I cannot see them. They are lost.
But tonight they have discovered this river with no trouble,
They are scrubbed and self-assured as the great planets.

The Big Dipper is my only familiar.
I miss Orion and Cassiopeia's Chair. Maybe they are
Hanging shyly under the studded horizon
Like a child's too-simple mathematical problem.
Infinite number seems to be the issue up there.
Or else they are present, and their disguise so bright
I am overlooking them by looking too hard.
Perhaps it is the season that is not right.

And what if the sky here is no different,
And it is my eyes that have been sharpening themselves?
Such a luxury of stars would embarrass me.
The few I am used to are plain and durable;
I think they would not wish for this dressy backcloth
Or much company, or the mildness of the south.
They are too puritan and solitary for that—
When one of them falls it leaves a space,

A sense of absence in its old shining place.
And where I lie now, back to my own dark star,
I see those constellations in my head,
Unwarmed by the sweet air of this peach orchard.
There is too much ease here; these stars treat me too well.
On this hill, with its view of lit castles, each swung bell
Is accounting for its cow. I shut my eyes
And drink the small night chill like news of home.

Please share your new poem using Mr. Linky below and visit others in the spirit of the community—

(And our Sanaa will have a new exciting feature to share with us every second Friday of the month. So stay tuned for this Friday - the 13th. Next week Susan’s Midweek Motif will be ~ Vigilance)

Poets United Midweek Motif ~ Weather

   

“Who cares about the clouds when we are together? Just sing a song and bring the sunny weather.”— Dale Evans

SOURCE

“Conversation about the weather is the last refuge of the unimaginative.”— Oscar Wilde

    Midweek Motif ~ Weather

In spite of Wilde’s critical observations about some people we are to talk of Weather today. And that too as imaginative poets.

Weather phenomena have become common topics of conversations worldwide, as humans have altered their environment and much damaged their relationship with nature.

Very recently, having gone without a single drop of rain for about 200 days at a stretch Chennai finally got a little rain and way too little for a city experiencing its worst water crisis in 30 years.

Let’s see what face of weather peeps in your lines: merciful, catastrophic or metaphoric.

A few poems to share with you:

Fair Weather

by Dorothy Parker

This level reach of blue is not my sea;
Here are sweet waters, pretty in the sun,
Whose quiet ripples meet obediently
A marked and measured line, one after one.
This is no sea of mine. that humbly laves
Untroubled sands, spread glittering and warm.
I have a need of wilder, crueler waves;
They sicken of the calm, who knew the storm.

So let a love beat over me again,
Loosing its million desperate breakers wide;
Sudden and terrible to rise and wane;
Roaring the heavens apart; a reckless tide
That casts upon the heart, as it recedes,
Splinters and spars and dripping, salty weeds. 

A Process In The Weather Of The Heart

by Dylan Thomas

A process in the weather of the heart
Turns damp to dry; the golden shot
Storms in the freezing tomb.
A weather in the quarter of the veins
Turns night to day; blood in their suns
Lights up the living worm.

A process in the eye forewarns
The bones of blindness; and the womb
Drives in a death as life leaks out.

A darkness in the weather of the eye
Is half its light; the fathomed sea
Breaks on unangled land.
The seed that makes a forest of the loin
Forks half its fruit; and half drops down,
Slow in a sleeping wind.

A weather in the flesh and bone
Is damp and dry; the quick and dead
Move like two ghosts before the eye.

A process in the weather of the world
Turns ghost to ghost; each mothered child
Sits in their double shade.
A process blows the moon into the sun,
Pulls down the shabby curtains of the skin;
And the heart gives up its dead. 

Here is a link to a fun poem:

Problems With Hurricanes by Victor Hernández Cruz

Please share your new poem using Mr. Linky below and visit others in the spirit of the community—

(Next week Sanaa’s Midweek Motif will be ~ Perfume)

Poets United Midweek Motif ~ Almond Blossoms, by Vincent Van Gogh: An Ekphrastic Poem

 

“Life is the art of drawing without an eraser.”— John W. Gardener

SOURCE

“No better way is there to learn to love Nature than to understand Art. It dignifies every flower of the field. And, the boy who sees the thing of beauty which a bird on the wing becomes when transferred to wood or canvas will probably not throw the customary stone”.— Oscar Wilde

Midweek Motif ~ Almond Blossoms, by Vincent Van Gogh: An Ekphrastic Poem

We want your literary response to a non-literary work this week. We have Vincent van Gogh’s Almond Blossoms as your motif today.

“Almond Blossoms is from a group of several paintings made in 1888 and 1890 by Vincent van Gogh in Arles and Saint-Rémy, southern France of blossoming almond trees. Flowering trees were special to van Gogh. They represented awakening and hope. He enjoyed them aesthetically and found joy in painting flowering trees.” Wikipedia

Sharing a couple of ekphrastic poems for your inspiration:

SOURCE

The Starry Night

by Anne Sexton

That does not keep me from having a terrible need of — shall I say the word — religion. Then I go out at night to paint the stars. –Vincent Van Gogh in a letter to his brother

The town does not exist
except where one black-haired tree slips
up like a drowned woman into the hot sky.
The town is silent. The night boils with eleven stars.
Oh starry starry night! This is how
I want to die.

It moves. They are all alive.
Even the moon bulges in its orange irons
to push children, like a god, from its eye.
The old unseen serpent swallows up the stars.
Oh starry starry night! This is how
I want to die:

TWO MONKEYS by BRUEGHEL (1562)

Two Monkeys by Brueghel 
(trans. from the Polish by Magnus Kryski)

by Wislawa Szymborska

I keep dreaming of my graduation exam:
in a window sit two chained monkeys,
beyond the window floats the sky,
and the sea splashes.

I am taking an exam on the history of mankind:
I stammer and flounder.

One monkey, eyes fixed upon me, listens ironically,
the other seems to be dozing--
and when silence follows a question,
he prompts me
with a soft jingling of the chain.

Please share your new poem using Mr. Linky below and visit others in the spirit of the community—

              (Next week Susan’s Midweek Motif will be ~ Biodiversity)

Poets United Midweek Motif ~ Prayer

The sacred Mount Kailash in Tibet.
From Bild:Kailash Tibet.jpg; photo taken by Heringf. 

“I talk to God but the sky is empty.” 

― Sylvia Plath

“If the only prayer you said was thank you, that would be enough.” 

― Meister Eckhart

“You pray in your distress and in your need; would that you might pray also in the fullness of your joy and in your days of abundance.” ― Kahill Gibran

“I prayed for freedom for twenty years, but received no answer 

until I prayed with my legs.” ― Frederick Douglass

"I believe some people-- lots of people-- pray through the witness of their lives, through the work they do, the friendships they have, the love they offer people and receive from people. Since when are words the only acceptable form of prayer?” ― Dorothy Day

"There are hundreds of ways to kneel and kiss the ground.”― Rumi

source

Midweek Motif ~ Prayer

Thousands of poems say they are prayers, and hundreds of books exist about prayer.  Still more poems and prose are prayer-like without saying so ~ Walt Whitman's and Mary Oliver's poems, for example. 

So what can we add?  Poems about our experience-based knowledge?  Mystic moments?  Silence? Rejection? Love?  

What haven't you said?  

What bears repeating?

Your Challenge:  Write a new poem in which the narrator observes prayer or reveals some truth about prayer.

Praying Hands by Albrecht Dürer

I happened to be Standing
by Mary Oliver

"I don't know where prayers go,
     or what they do.
Do cats pray, while they sleep
     half-asleep in the sun?
Does the opossum pray as it
     crosses the street?
The sunflowers? The old black oak
     growing older every year?" 

far memory

BY LUCILLE CLIFTON

a poem in seven parts

1

convent

my knees recall the pockets

worn into the stone floor,

my hands, tracing against

the wall their original name, remember

the cold brush of brick, and the smell

of the brick powdery and wet

and the light finding its way in

through the high bars.

and also the sisters singing

at matins, their sweet music

the voice of the universe at peace

and the candles their light the light

at the beginning of creation

and the wonderful simplicity of prayer

smooth along the wooden beads

and certainly attended.

2

someone inside me remembers

that my knees must be hidden away

that my hair must be shorn

so that vanity will not test me

that my fingers are places of prayer

and are holy that my body is promised

to something more certain

than myself

. . . .

(Read the rest HERE.)

The Ballad of Reading Gaol

BY OSCAR WILDE

I 

He did not wear his scarlet coat, 

For blood and wine are red, 

And blood and wine were on his hands 

When they found him with the dead, 

The poor dead woman whom he loved, 

And murdered in her bed. 

He walked amongst the Trial Men 

In a suit of shabby gray; 

A cricket cap was on his head, 

And his step seemed light and gay; 

But I never saw a man who looked 

So wistfully at the day. 

I never saw a man who looked 

With such a wistful eye 

Upon that little tent of blue 

Which prisoners call the sky, 

And at every drifting cloud that went 

With sails of silver by. 

I walked, with other souls in pain, 

Within another ring, 

And was wondering if the man had done 

A great or little thing, 

When a voice behind me whispered low, 

"That fellow's got to swing." 

Dear Christ! the very prison walls 

Suddenly seemed to reel, 

And the sky above my head became 

Like a casque of scorching steel; 

And, though I was a soul in pain, 

My pain I could not feel. 

I only knew what hunted thought 

Quickened his step, and why 

He looked upon the garish day 

With such a wistful eye; 

The man had killed the thing he loved, 

And so he had to die. 

Yet each man kills the thing he loves, 

By each let this be heard, 

Some do it with a bitter look, 

Some with a flattering word, 

The coward does it with a kiss, 

The brave man with a sword! 

Some kill their love when they are young, 

And some when they are old; 

Some strangle with the hands of Lust, 

Some with the hands of Gold: 

The kindest use a knife, because 

The dead so soon grow cold. 

Some love too little, some too long, 

Some sell, and others buy; 

Some do the deed with many tears, 

And some without a sigh: 

For each man kills the thing he loves, 

Yet each man does not die. 

. . . . 

(Read the rest HERE.)

Norman Rockwell, Golden Rule, 1961.
Source
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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 ~ Morning Poem.)