Poets United Midweek Motif ~ Safety

“The ache for home lives in all of us. The safe place where 
we can go as we are and not be questioned.”
― Maya Angelou, All God's Children . . .

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 “Would you give up the craft of your hands, and the passion of your heart, and the hunger of your mind, to buy safety?”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Farthest Shore 

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“When we are taught that safety lies always with sameness, then difference, of any kind, will appear as a threat”

― bell hooks 

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Midweek Motif ~ Safety

Do we have or offer safety?  A reasonable amount of safety? Or maybe a"feeling of safety"?

Mostly, I live as if I have safety, spinning an atmosphere of safety around me, inviting others in. 

Your Challenge: In a new poem, give us an experience of safety or lack of safety or a change from one to the other. 

Safety fence on side of footpath, Abingworth, photo by Dave Spicer

 Persephone, Falling

Rita Dove - 1952-

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.

"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.

"Fern Hill" by Dylan Thomas

Yom Kippur 1984

By Adrienne Rich

 

           I drew solitude over me, on the long shore.
                                        —Robinson Jeffers, “Prelude”

          For whoever does not afflict his soul through this day, shall be
          cut off from his people.
                                                                           —Leviticus 23:29

What is a Jew in solitude?

What would it mean not to feel lonely or afraid

far from your own or those you have called your own?

What is a woman in solitude:   a queer woman or man?

In the empty street, on the empty beach, in the desert

what in this world as it is can solitude mean?

The glassy, concrete octagon suspended from the cliffs

with its electric gate, its perfected privacy

is not what I mean

the pick-up with a gun parked at a turn-out in Utah or the Golan Heights

is not what I mean

the poet’s tower facing the western ocean, acres of forest planted to the east, the woman reading in the cabin, her attack dog suddenly risen

is not what I mean

Three thousand miles from what I once called home

I open a book searching for some lines I remember

about flowers, something to bind me to this coast as lilacs in the dooryard once

bound me back there—yes, lupines on a burnt mountainside,

something that bloomed and faded and was written down

in the poet’s book, forever:

Opening the poet’s book

I find the hatred in the poet’s heart: . . . the hateful-eyed

and human-bodied are all about me: you that love multitude may have them

Robinson Jeffers, multitude

is the blur flung by distinct forms against these landward valleys

and the farms that run down to the sea; the lupines

are multitude, and the torched poppies, the grey Pacific unrolling its scrolls of surf,

and the separate persons, stooped

over sewing machines in denim dust, bent under the shattering skies of harvest

who sleep by shifts in never-empty beds have their various dreams

Hands that pick, pack, steam, stitch, strip, stuff, shell, scrape, scour, belong to a brain like no other

Must I argue the love of multitude in the blur or defend

a solitude of barbed-wire and searchlights, the survivalist’s final solution, have I a choice?
. . . . 

(Read the rest HERE.)

🧷🧷🧷

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

Next week, Sumana's prompt will be "Televised." 

Poets United Midweek Motif ~ Picnic(s)

A book of verse beneath the bough,
A loaf of bread, a jug of wine, and thou
Beside me singing in the Wilderness –
Ah, wilderness were paradise enow!

— Omar Khayyam

"The countryside — usually a village by a river or ringed by hills — 
scores well as the family picnic destination."
 Photo: V Raju in "For the love of picnics" by Anjana Basu 

"A picnic may well be a metaphor for life. The essentials for happiness are the right company, moderate if sanguine expectations and a reasonable standard of physical sustenance and comfort, the whole being bedeviled by the belief that there is always something better to be had if only one presses on." ~ P. D. James

Midweek Motif ~ Picnic(s)

"It's no picnic!" is an English idiom meaning "It's difficult."  I've had some difficult picnics, too, what with bugs, wild things, and forgotten bottle openers ~ but the basic idea is to get away from normalcy with very good food, drink and company. Sometimes for me, the company has been a very good book.

What are your fondest picnic experiences? the funniest? the most unexpected?

Your Challenge:  Using sense images, bring a picnic to life in a new poem. 

Hungarian: Majális (1873) Picnic in May

Knoxville Tennessee

by Nikki Giovanni

 I always like summer
Best
you can eat fresh corn
From daddy's garden
And okra
And greens
And cabbage
And lots of
Barbeque
And buttermilk
And homemade ice-cream
At the church picnic
And listen to
Gospel music
Outside
At the church
Homecoming
And go to the mountains with
Your grandmother
And go barefooted
And be warm
All the time
Not only when you go to bed
And sleep

The Shadow Voice

by Margaret Atwood

 My shadow said to me: 
what is the matter

Isn't the moon warm
enough for you
why do you need
the blanket of another body

Whose kiss is moss

Around the picnic tables
The bright pink hands held sandwiches
crumbled by distance.
 Flies crawl
over the sweet instant

You know what is in these blankets

The trees outside are bending with
children shooting guns.
 Leave
them alone.
 They are playing
games of their own.

I give water, I give clean crusts

Aren't there enough words
flowing in your veins
to keep you going.

Grape sherbet

by Rita Dove 

The day? Memorial.
After the grill
Dad appears with his masterpiece–
swirled snow, gelled light.
We cheer. The recipe's
a secret and he fights
a smile, his cap turned up
so the bib resembles a duck.

That morning we galloped
through the grassed-over mounds
and named each stone
for a lost milk tooth. Each dollop
of sherbet, later,
is a miracle,
like salt on a melon that makes it sweeter.

Everyone agrees– it's wonderful!
It's just how we imagined lavender
would taste. The diabetic grandmother
stares from the porch,
a torch
of pure refusal.

We thought no one was lying
there under our feet,
we thought it
was a joke. I've been trying
to remember the taste,
but it doesn't exist.
Now I see why
you bothered,
father.

*****

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 ~ Light )

Poets United Midweek Motif ~ Abundance

“You can’t use up creativity. 

The more you use, the more you have.” 

~ Maya Angelou

Allegory of plenty

“Abundance is all around us. Only our efforts at tower-building blind us to it, our gaze forever skyward, forever seeking to escape this Earth, this feeling, this moment.” 
~ Charles Eisenstein, The More Beautiful World . . . 

🍎🍏🍎🍏🍎

Midweek Motif ~ Abundance

To me abundance means "more than enough."  I believe everyone can have enough because abundance exists: abundance of money, food, love, water, etc.  It's possible that scarcity is fake.  

Harvest time makes me aware of abundance.  So does spring, when rain and flowers abound.

Your Challenge:  In a new poem ~ show what, if anything, makes you aware of abundance.

🍎🍏🍎🍏🍎

Vasudhara, Goddess of Abundance,  1082 AD

I Have Been a Stranger in a Strange Land

BY RITA DOVE

Life's spell is so exquisite, everything conspires to break it.

~ Emily Dickinson

It wasn't bliss. What was bliss 

but the ordinary life? She'd spend hours 

in patter, moving through whole days 

touching, sniffing, tasting . . . exquisite 

housekeeping in a charmed world. 

And yet there was always 

more of the same, all that happiness, 

the aimless Being There. 

So she wandered for a while, bush to arbor, 

lingered to look through a pond's restive mirror. 

He was off cataloging the universe, probably, 

pretending he could organize 

what was clearly someone else's chaos. 

That's when she found the tree, 

the dark, crabbed branches 

bearing up such speechless bounty, 

she knew without being told 

this was forbidden. It wasn't 

a question of ownership— 

who could lay claim to 

such maddening perfection? 

And there was no voice in her head, 

no whispered intelligence lurking 

in the leaves—just an ache that grew 

until she knew she'd already lost everything 

except desire, the red heft of it 

warming her outstretched palm.

Abundance by Marianna Ochyra (2015)

Happiness 

BY PAISLEY REKDAL

I have been taught never to brag but now

I cannot help it: I keep

a beautiful garden, all abundance,

indiscriminate, pulling itself

from the stubborn earth: does it offend you

to watch me working in it,

touching my hands to the greening tips or

tearing the yellow stalks back, so wild

the living and the dead both

snap off in my hands?

The neighbor with his stuttering

fingers, the neighbor with his broken

love: each comes up my drive

to receive his pitying,

accustomed consolations, watches me

work in silence awhile, rises in anger,

walks back. Does it offend them to watch me

not mourning with them but working

fitfully, fruitlessly, working

the way the bees work, which is to say

by instinct alone, which looks like pleasure?

. . . . 

(Read the rest HERE.)

 Peace embracing Plenty by Peter Paul Rubens (1633)

In Harvest

BY SOPHIE JEWETT

Mown meadows skirt the standing wheat;

I linger, for the hay is sweet,

New-cut and curing in the sun.

Like furrows, straight, the windrows run,

Fallen, gallant ranks that tossed and bent

When, yesterday, the west wind went

A-rioting through grass and grain.

To-day no least breath stirs the plain;

Only the hot air, quivering, yields

Illusive motion to the fields

Where not the slenderest tassel swings.

Across the wheat flash sky-blue wings;

A goldfinch dangles from a tall,

Full-flowered yellow mullein; all

The world seems turning blue and gold.

Unstartled, since, even from of old,

Beauty has brought keen sense of her,

I feel the withering grasses stir;

Along the edges of the wheat,

I hear the rustle of her feet:

And yet I know the whole sea lies,

And half the earth, between our eyes.

Cornucopia

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)