Poets United Midweek Motif ~ Truth

“The truth isn't always beauty, but the hunger for it is.” 

― Nadine Gordimer

“Writing needs raw truth, wants your suffering and darkness on the table, revels in a cutting mind that takes no prisoners...” 

― Natalie Goldberg

“Truth has to be repeated constantly, because Error also is being preached all the time, and not just by a few, but by the multitude.” 

― Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Truth, holding a mirror and a serpent, by  Olin Levi Warner (1896).

 Midweek Motif ~ Truth

Back in the 1970s,  Adrienne Rich’s “Women and Honor: Some Notes on Lying” asserted that  omission of truth is as much a lie as falsifying of information.  Honor demands truth. Rich says:

“The unconscious wants truth, as the body does. The complexity and fecundity of dreams come from the complexity and fecundity of the unconscious struggling to fulfill that desire.”  

I believe we poets aim always to tell the truth about things and about truth itself.   But truth is difficult. 

Your challenge:  Choose a truth to tell in a poem.  Or tell us how and where to find “the truth.”

Allegory of Truth by Jacopo Tintoretto (1 January 1564)

Sonnet 138: 

When My Love Swears That She Is Made Of Truth

by William Shakespeare

When my love swears that she is made of truth

I do believe her, though I know she lies,

That she might think me some untutored youth,

Unlearnèd in the world's false subtleties.

Thus vainly thinking that she thinks me young,

Although she knows my days are past the best,

Simply I credit her false-speaking tongue;

On both sides thus is simple truth suppressed.

But wherefore says she not she is unjust?

And wherefore say not I that I am old?

O, love's best habit is in seeming trust,

And age in love, loves not to have years told.

Therefore I lie with her, and she with me,

And in our faults by lies we flattered be. 

~

Truth Coming Out of Her Well to Shame Mankind by  Jean-Léon Gérôme (1896) 

~

Tell all the truth but tell it slant — (1263)

BY EMILY DICKINSON

Tell all the truth but tell it slant —

Success in Circuit lies

Too bright for our infirm Delight

The Truth's superb surprise

As Lightning to the Children eased

With explanation kind

The Truth must dazzle gradually

Or every man be blind —

Search for Truth

by DH Lawrence

Search for nothing any more, nothing
except truth.
Be very still, and try and get at the truth.

And the first question to ask yourself is:
How great a liar am I? 

A Truth, a Poem
~

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 ~ Running.)

Poet United Midweek Motif ~ Moon

A Lunar Eclipse Glows Red

“Just like moons and suns,

With certainty of tides,

Just like hopes springing high,

Still I'll rise.”

                                                       ― Maya Angelou

“The moon does not fight. It attacks no one. It does not worry. It does not try to crush others. It keeps to its course, but by its very nature, it gently influences. What other body could pull an entire ocean from shore to shore?" 

― Ming-Dao Deng, Everyday Tao

"Those are the same stars, and that is the same moon, that look down upon your brothers and sisters, and which they see as they look up to them, though they are ever so far away from us, and each other." 

―Sojourner Truth

🌕

Midweek Motif ~ Moon

Today is a special day for the moon:  

Source

Today you may witness a "Super" blue moon, coinciding with a lunar eclipse for the 1st time in 150 years.  Moonlight and lunacy, light and shadow, ever leaving and ever returning ~ 

Your Challenge: Does today's convergence magnify or change the moon's character?  Make a new poem  for the moon, using a perspective new to you.

                 

Full Moon and Little Frieda

by Ted Hughes

A cool small evening shrunk to a dog bark and the clank of a bucket -

And you listening.

A spider's web, tense for the dew's touch.

A pail lifted, still and brimming - mirror

To tempt a first star to a tremor.

Cows are going home in the lane there, looping the hedges with their warm

wreaths of breath -

A dark river of blood, many boulders,

Balancing unspilled milk.

'Moon!' you cry suddenly, 'Moon! Moon!'

The moon has stepped back like an artist gazing amazed at a work

That points at him amazed.
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Having Lost My Sons, I Confront the Wreckage 
Of The Moon: Christmas, 1960  
by James Wright

After dark
Near the South Dakota border,
The moon is out hunting, everywhere,
Delivering fire,
And walking down hallways
Of a diamond.

Behind a tree,
It ights on the ruins
Of a white city
Frost, frost.

Where are they gone
Who lived there?

Bundled away under wings
And dark faces.

I am sick
Of it, and I go on
Living, alone, alone,
Past the charred silos, past the hidden graves
Of Chippewas and Norwegians.

This cold winter
Moon spills the inhuman fire
Of jewels
Into my hands.

Dead riches, dead hands, the moon
Darkens,
And I am lost in the beautiful white ruins
Of America.
🌕

Full Moon by Du Fu

Above the tower -- a lone, twice-sized moon.

On the cold river passing night-filled homes,

It scatters restless gold across the waves.

On mats, it shines richer than silken gauze.

Empty peaks, silence: among sparse stars,

Not yet flawed, it drifts. Pine and cinnamon

Spreading in my old garden . . . All light,

All ten thousand miles at once in its light! 

🌕

Song Of The Moon

by Claude McKay

The moonlight breaks upon the city's domes,

And falls along cemented steel and stone,

Upon the grayness of a million homes,

Lugubrious in unchanging monotone.

Upon the clothes behind the tenement,

That hang like ghosts suspended from the lines,

Linking each flat to each indifferent,

Incongruous and strange the moonlight shines.

There is no magic from your presence here,

Ho, moon, sad moon, tuck up your trailing robe,

Whose silver seems antique and so severe

Against the glow of one electric globe.

o spill your beauty on the laughing faces

Of happy flowers that bloom a thousand hues,

Waiting on tiptoe in the wilding spaces,

To drink your wine mixed with sweet drafts of dews. 

🌕

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 ~ Shoes)