Poets United Midweek Motif ~ Authenticity

  “But to be what I am, to live what I was meant to live, to want to sound like no one else, to yield the blossoms dictated to my heart: this is what I want - and this surely cannot be arrogance.”

― Rainer Maria Rilke (Letters on Life)

“Some writers confuse authenticity, which they ought always to aim at, with originality, which they should never bother about.”

― W.H. Auden

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“To be authentic, we must cultivate the courage to be imperfect — and vulnerable. We have to believe that we are fundamentally worthy of love and acceptance, just as we are. I’ve learned that there is no better way to invite more grace, gratitude and joy into our lives than by mindfully practicing authenticity.”

 — Brené Brown

 Midweek Motif ~ Authenticity

 (the quality of being real or true)

What makes each of us authentic?  Where and when are we most authentic?  Do people perceive us as inauthentic if we change?  In what ways does authenticity shape anyone's writing and art?  


As Sumana would say, "We are all ears."

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Bouquet of Roses in Sunlight 

 by Wallace Stevens

Say that it is a crude effect, black reds,
Pink yellows, orange whites, too much as they are
To be anything else in the sunlight of the room,

Too much as they are to be changed by metaphor,
Too actual, things that in being real
Make any imaginings of them lesser things.

And yet this effect is a consequence of the way
We feel and, therefore, is not real, except
In our sense of it, our sense of the fertilest red,

Of yellow as first color and of white,
In which the sense lies still, as a man lies,
Enormous, in a completing of his truth.

Our sense of these things changes and they change,
Not as in metaphor, but in our sense
Of them.  So sense exceeds all metaphor.

It exceeds the heavy changes of the light.
It is like a flow of meanings with no speech
And of as many meanings as of men.

We are two that use these roses as we are,
In seeing them.  This is what makes them seem
So far beyond the rhetorician’s touch.

Renoir Bouquet of Roses (1882)

 

 

 

 

 

 

    

 

 

An Ancient Gesture

       by Edna St Vincent Millay

I thought, as I wiped my eyes on the corner of my apron:
Penelope did this too.

And more than once: you can't keep weaving all day
And undoing it all through the night;
Your arms get tired, and the back of your neck gets tight;
And along towards morning, when you think it will never be light,
And your husband has been gone, and you don't know where, for years.

Suddenly you burst into tears;
There is simply nothing else to do.

And I thought, as I wiped my eyes on the corner of my apron:
This is an ancient gesture, authentic, antique,
In the very best tradition, classic, Greek;
Ulysses did this too.

But only as a gesture,—a gesture which implied
To the assembled throng that he was much too moved to speak.

He learned it from Penelope.
.
.

. 

Penelope, who really cried.

Odysseus and Penelope by Francesco Primaticcio (1563)

We Wear the Mask

Paul Laurence Dunbar - 1872-1906

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 over-wise,
In counting all our tears and sighs?
Nay, let them only see us, while
     We wear the mask.

We smile, but oh 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!

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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 ~ Winter )
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Poets United Midweek Motif ~ Biodiversity

“The universe is full of magical things patiently waiting for our wits to grow sharper."

--Eden Phillpotts

“Our task must be to free ourselves... by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature and it's beauty.”
  ― Albert Einstein 

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 Definition From Wikipedia: "Biodiversity is the degree of variation of life. This can refer to genetic variation, species variation, or ecosystem variation within an area, biome, or planet."

General meaning of biodiversity

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Midweek Motif ~ Biodiversity

Today I am trying to wrap my mind around the diversity of life.  How do we fit into the family of life on our home planet?  

Here's one viewpoint: 

 “The extraordinary thing we now know, thanks to Crick and Watson’s discovery of DNA and the decoding of the human and other genomes, is that all life, everything, all the three million species of life and plant life—all have the same source. We all come from a single source."

―Jonathan Sacks in Krista Tippett, Becoming Wise

Your Challenge:  In a new poem bring us a little way into one aspect of biodiversity, helping to make visible our part in the whole.

How farmers produce biodiversity.

The Peace of Wild Things

by Wendell Berry
 

When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

Out of the rolling ocean the crowd

By Walt Whitman

 

Out of the rolling ocean the crowd came a drop gently to me,

Whispering, I love you, before long I die,

I have travell’d a long way merely to look on you to touch you,

For I could not die till I once look’d on you,

For I fear’d I might afterward lose you.

Now we have met, we have look’d, we are safe,

Return in peace to the ocean my love,

I too am part of that ocean, my love, we are not so much separated,

Behold the great rondure, the cohesion of all, how perfect!

But as for me, for you, the irresistible sea is to separate us,

As for an hour carrying us diverse, yet cannot carry us diverse forever;

Be not impatient – a little space – know you I salute the air, the ocean and the land,

Every day at sundown for your dear sake, my love.

 Book of Hours II, 16 

By Rainer Maria Rilke

How surely gravity's law,
strong as an ocean current,
takes hold of even the strongest thing
and pulls it toward the heart of the world.

Each thing –
each stone, blossom, child –
is held in place.
Only we, in our arrogance,
push out beyond what we belong to
for some empty freedom.

If we surrendered
to earth's intelligence
we could rise up rooted, like trees.

Instead we entangle ourselves
in knots of our own making
and struggle, lonely and confused.

So, like children, we begin again
to learn from the things,
because they are in God's heart;
they have never left him.

This is what the things can teach us:
to fall,
patiently to trust our heaviness.
Even a bird has to do that
before he can fly. 

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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 ~ Gift.)