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        

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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.

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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 ~  A / The Moment.)

Poets United Midweek Motif ~ Glory

“Age is the acceptance of a term of years. But maturity is the glory of years.”— Martha Graham

   

SOURCE

“Love of glory can only create a great hero; contempt of glory creates a great man.”— Charles Maurice de Talleyrand

Midweek Motif ~ Glory

Paths of glory can be many. Which do you want to traverse?

The First World War poets well realized “that war is not glorious and the people they are fighting are not their enemy.”

You can either keep your focus on human theme; that is directing your poem towards the meaning ‘high renown or honor won by notable achievements’ or towards ‘magnificence or great beauty’.

Here are some ‘Glory’ poems:

Buddha In Glory

by Rainer Maria Rilke

Center of all centers, core of cores,
almond self-enclosed, and growing sweet--
all this universe, to the furthest stars
all beyond them, is your flesh, your fruit.

Now you feel how nothing clings to you;
your vast shell reaches into endless space,
and there the rich, thick fluids rise and flow.
Illuminated in your infinite peace,

a billion stars go spinning through the night,
blazing high above your head.
But in you is the presence that
will be, when all the stars are dead. 

Glory of Women

by Siegfried Sassoon

You love us when we’re heroes, home on leave,

or wounded in a mentionable place.

You worship decorations; you believe

That chivalry redeems the war’s disgrace.

You make us shells. You listen with delight,

By tales of dirt and danger ardours while we fight,

And mourn our laurelled memories when we’re killed.

You can’t believe that British troops “retire”

When hell’s last horror breaks them, and they run,

Trampling the terrible corpses-blind with blood.

O German mother dreaming by the fire,

While you are knitting socks to send your son

His face is trodden deeper in the mud.

Torn Down From Glory Daily

by Anne Sexton

All day we watched the gulls
striking the top of the sky
and riding the blown roller coaster.
Up there
godding the whole blue world
and shrieking at a snip of land.
Now, like children,
we climb down humps of rock
with a bag of dinner rolls,
left over,
and spread them gently on stone,
leaving six crusts for an early king.
A single watcher comes hawking in,
rides the current round its hunger
and hangs
carved in silk
until it throbs up suddenly,
out, and one inch over water;
to come again
smoothing over the slap tide.
To come bringing its flock, like a city
of wings that fall from the air.
They wait, each like a wooden decoy
or soft like a pigeon or
a sweet snug duck:
until one moves, moves that dart-beak
breaking over. It has the bread.
The world is full of them,
a world of beasts
thrusting for one rock.
Just four scoop out the bread
and go swinging over Gloucester
to the top of the sky.
Oh see how
they cushion their fishy bellies
with a brother's crumb. 

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 ~ Literacy)

Poets United Midweek Motif ~ Narcissus (Vanity/Narcissism)

Range of Narcissus cultivars

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“The main condition for the achievement of love is the overcoming of one's narcissism. ” ~ Erich Fromm, The Art of Loving 

Vanity is as ill at ease under indifference as tenderness is under a love which it cannot return.  ~ George Eliot 

“. . . . 'But... was Narcissus beautiful?' the lake asked. . . .   
'I weep for Narcissus, but I never noticed that Narcissus was beautiful. I weep because, each time he knelt beside my banks, I could see, in the depths of his eyes, my own beauty reflected.'”  ~ Paulo Coelho, The Alchemist

Dante Gabriel Rossetti - "Persephone".jpg

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Midweek Motif ~

Narcissus (Vanity / Narcissisum)

The narcissus is one of December's birth flowers.  According to Greek myth, it is the flower that grew when the vain young man Narcissus drowned in the lake in which he admired his own reflection.  There's more to the story--Echo, goddesses, love,  and, related to it is the story of Persephone and Demeter, a pomegranate, death, winter and summer.  Picking a narcissus flower separated Persephone from her peers, and Hades kidnapped her.  Her story associates her with the life cycle of plants.  

Do any of these stories have meaning to you? 

If not, hold with the beautiful flower itself.

Your Challenge: Write a new poem in response to the themes of one of the images included in this prompt.  (You may also provide images of your own that relate to narcissus and/or vanity).  

Demeter and Persephone :
"Demeter rejoiced, for her daughter was by her side"

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Persephone, Falling

by Rita Dove

One narcissus among the ordinary beautiful
flowers, one unlike all the others!  She pulled,
stooped to pull harder—
when, sprung out of the earth
on his glittering terrible
carriage, he claimed his due.
It is finished.  No one heard her.
No one!  She had strayed from the herd.

(Remember: go straight to school.
This is important, stop fooling around!
Don’t answer to strangers.  Stick
with your playmates.  Keep your eyes down.)
This is how easily the pit
opens.  This is how one foot sinks into the ground.

(In Mother Love by Rita Dove. © 1995, W.W. Norton & Company.  Used with permission.)

Echo And Narcissus, John William Waterhouse (1903)

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Narcissus

By Rainer Maria Rilke

Encircled by her arms as by a shell,

she hears her being murmur,

while forever he endures

the outrage of his too pure image...

Wistfully following their example,

nature re-enters herself;

contemplating its own sap, the flower

becomes too soft, and the boulder hardens...

It's the return of all desire that enters

toward all life embracing itself from afar...

Where does it fall? Under the dwindling

surface, does it hope to renew a center? 

Sylvia Plath | Source

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Mirror
by Sylvia Plath

I am silver and exact. I have no preconceptions. 
Whatever I see I swallow immediately 
Just as it is, unmisted by love or dislike. 
I am not cruel, only truthful- 
The eye of the little god, four cornered. 
Most of the time I meditate on the opposite wall.  
It is pink, with speckles. I have looked at it so long 
I think it is a part of my heart. But it flickers. 
Faces and darkness separate us over and over. 


Now I am a lake. A woman bends over me, 
Searching my reaches for what she really is. 
Then she turns to those liars, the candles or the moon. 
I see her back, and reflect it faithfully. 
She rewards me with tears and an agitation of hands. 
I am important to her. She comes and goes. 
Each morning it is her face that replaces the darkness. 
In me she has drowned a young girl, and in me an old woman 
Rises toward her day after day, like a terrible fish.

Ecclesiastes 1:2, Vanity of Vanities, all is Vanity.
 Still Life by Jan Vermeulen (1653)

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Song VII (“My song has put off her adornments”)

BY RABINDRANATH TAGORE

My song has put off her adornments.

She has no pride of dress and decoration. 

Ornaments would mar our union;

they would come between thee and me; 

their jingling would drown thy whispers.

My poet’s vanity dies in shame before thy sight. 

O master poet, I have sat down at thy feet. 

Only let me make my life simple and straight, 

like a flute of reed for thee to fill with music.

Narcissus ~  Paperwhite

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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 Celebration. )

Poets United Midweek Motif ~ Autumn

  “Autumn is a second spring when every leaf is a flower.”— Albert Camus

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“When autumn darkness falls, what we will remember are the small acts of kindness: a cake, a hug, an invitation to talk, and every single rose. These are all expressions of a nation coming together and caring about its people.”— Jens Stoltenberg

        Midweek Motif ~ Autumn

In West Bengal, India, where I live Autumn has two entities; Early, (we call it Sharat) and Late (known as Hemanta). As the Monsoon peters out, Sharat, slightly warm, sets in with a richness of fulfillment and festivity all around. While Hemanta has a distinct nip in the air; it is a pre-winter season. Our poets eulogize both.

In the US Autumn is Fall, full of vibrant colors. Foliage lights up with brilliant, yellow, red, orange. Very much scenic and beautiful. A time for lighting a fire in the fireplace. Robert Frost sings, “O hushed October morning mild, / Begin the hours of this day slow.” It’s a preparation season for the approaching 

winter.

John Keats says, “Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness….thou hast thy music too, —”

And we are all ears, poets, for your autumnal music:

On A Withered Branch

by Matsuo Basho

On a withered branch

A crow has alighted

Nightfall in autumn

Autumn

by Thomas Ernest Hulme

 A touch of cold in the Autumn night

I walked abroad,

And saw the ruddy moon lean over a hedge

Like a red-faced farmer.

I did not stop to speak, but nodded;

And round about were the wistful stars

With white faces like town children.

November Night

by Adelaide Crapsey                       

Listen.

With faint dry sound,

Like steps of passing ghosts,

The Leaves, frost-crisp’d, break from the trees

And fall.

Autumn

by Rainer Maria Rilke

The leaves are falling, falling as if from far up,

as if orchards were dying high in space.

Each leaf falls as if it were motioning “no”.

 And tonight the heavy earth is falling

away from all other stars in the loneliness.

We’re all falling. This hand here is falling.

And look at the other one. It’s in them all.

And yet there is Someone, whose hands

Infinitely calm, holding up all this falling.

Autumn Valentine

by Dorothy Parker

In May my heart was breaking-

Oh, wide the wound, and deep!

And bitter it beat at waking,

And sore it split in sleep.

And when it came November,

I sought my heart, and sighed,

“Poor thing, do you remember?”

“What heart was that?” it cried.

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 ~ Dark Moon, New Moon.)

Poets United Midweek Motif ~ Music

“Music is a moral law. It gives soul to the universe, wings to the mind, flight to the imagination, and charm and gaiety to life and to everything.”—Plato

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               Poets United Midweek Motif ~ Music

“Whenever I feel afraid, I hold my head erect
And whistle a happy tune, so no one will suspect I’m afraid…
And every single time,
the happiness in the tune convinces me that I’m not afraid.”

                 

This is how Rodgers and Hammerstein lyrics illustrate wonders of Music.

What is this life with no rhythm, melodies or harmonies?

Music itself is a universal language connecting all and Music is everywhere. We only need to lend our ears to SEE music!

Music is our motif today. You might also focus on any musical instrument, any special song or composer.

Music Swims Back To Me

By Anne Sexton

Wait Mister. Which way is home? 
They turned the light out
and the dark is moving in the corner.
There are no sign posts in this room, 
four ladies, over eighty, 
in diapers every one of them.
La la la, Oh music swims back to me
and I can feel the tune they played
the night they left me
in this private institution on a hill.

Imagine it. A radio playing
and everyone here was crazy.
I liked it and danced in a circle.
Music pours over the sense
and in a funny way
music sees more than I.
I mean it remembers better; 
remembers the first night here.
It was the strangled cold of November; 
even the stars were strapped in the sky
and that moon too bright
forking through the bars to stick me
with a singing in the head.
I have forgotten all the rest.

They lock me in this chair at eight a.m.
and there are no signs to tell the way, 
just the radio beating to itself
and the song that remembers
more than I. Oh, la la la, 
this music swims back to me.
The night I came I danced a circle
and was not afraid.
Mister? 

I Know The Music

By Wilfred Owen

All sounds have been as music to my listening:
Pacific lamentations of slow bells,
The crunch of boots on blue snow rosy-glistening,
Shuffle of autumn leaves; and all farewells:

Bugles that sadden all the evening air,
And country bells clamouring their last appeals
Before [the] music of the evening prayer;
Bridges, sonorous under carriage wheels.

Gurgle of sluicing surge through hollow rocks,
The gluttonous lapping of the waves on weeds,
Whisper of grass; the myriad-tinkling flocks,
The warbling drawl of flutes and shepherds' reeds.

The orchestral noises of October nights
Blowing ( ) symphonetic storms
Of startled clarions ( )
Drums, rumbling and rolling thunderous and ( ).

Thrilling of throstles in the keen blue dawn,
Bees fumbling and fuming over sainfoin-fields. 

 Music When Soft Voices Die

 By P. B. Shelley

Music, when soft voices die,
Vibrates in the memory;
Odours, when sweet violets sicken,
Live within the sense they quicken.

Rose leaves, when the rose is dead,
Are heaped for the beloved's bed;
And so thy thoughts, when thou art gone,
Love itself shall slumber on. 

Music

By Rainer Maria Rilke

Take me by the hand;
it's so easy for you, Angel,
for you are the road
even while being immobile.

You see, I'm scared no one
here will look for me again;
I couldn't make use of
whatever was given,

so they abandoned me.
At first the solitude
charmed me like a prelude,
but so much music wounded me.


(Translated by A. Poulin) 

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

               ( Susan’s Midweek Motif on 01/04/2017 will be ~ Vision)