Poets United Midweek Motif ~ Reading Fiction

"Raise your hand if you’ve ever felt even just a teensy bit guilty for carving precious time out of your busy, full life to dive into a book and relish a made-up story."  — Holly Parker, Ph.D, in Psychology Today

Alice's Adventures in Wonderland Illustrationen: John Tenniel

“It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, or who had ever been alive.”

 — James Baldwin

"Fiction that adds up, that suggests a ‘logical consistency,’ or an explanation of some kind, is surely second-rate fiction; for the truth of life is its mystery.” 

— Joyce Carol Oates

“The one way of tolerating existence is to lose oneself in literature as in a perpetual orgy.” 
— Gustave Flaubert

Captivated by Adolphe Alexandre Lesrel 

Midweek Motif ~ Reading Fiction

What happens when you read fiction?  Does it seem more a physical, intellectual, emotional or spiritual engagement?

Or don't you read it? 

Some say it distracts us from a true path, but others believe with Ralph Waldo Emerson that "Fiction reveals truths that reality obscures." 

Your challenge:  Write a new poem with "reading fiction" as topic and/or motif.

The Novel Reader by Vincent van Gogh (1888)

The House Was Quiet and The World Was Calm 

BY WALLACE STEVENS

The house was quiet and the world was calm.

The reader became the book; and summer night

Was like the conscious being of the book.

The house was quiet and the world was calm.

The words were spoken as if there was no book,

Except that the reader leaned above the page,

Wanted to lean, wanted much most to be

The scholar to whom his book is true, to whom

The summer night is like a perfection of thought.

The house was quiet because it had to be.

The quiet was part of the meaning, part of the mind:

The access of perfection to the page.

And the world was calm. The truth in a calm world,

In which there is no other meaning, itself

Is calm, itself is summer and night, itself

Is the reader leaning late and reading there.

How Reading Fiction Books Can Change You

The Land of Story-books

by Robert Louis Stevenson

At evening when the lamp is lit,

Around the fire my parents sit;

They sit at home and talk and sing,

And do not play at anything.

Now, with my little gun, I crawl

Away behind the sofa back.

All in the dark along the wall,

And follow round the forest track

And play at books that I have read

There, in the night, where none can spy,

All in my hunter’s camp I lie,

The roaring lions come to drink.

Till it is time to go to bed. 

These are the hills, these are the woods,

These are my starry solitudes;

I see the others far away

And there the river by whose brink 

Home I return across the sea,

As if in firelit camp they lay,

And I, like to an Indian scout,

Around their party prowled about.

So, when my nurse comes in for me,

At my dear land of Story-books.

And go to bed with backward looks

There is no frigate like a book (1263)

by Emily Dickinson

There is no Frigate like a Book 

To take us Lands away, 

Nor any Coursers like a Page 

Of prancing Poetry – 

This Traverse may the poorest take 

Without oppress of Toll – 

How frugal is the Chariot

That bears a Human soul.

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 ~ Ode to Age.)

Poets United Midweek Motif ~ Shoes

Vincent van Gogh - Shoes (1888) 

“In pictures like these there are always empty shoes. It's the shoes that get to me. Sad, that innocent daily task - putting your shoes on your feet, in the firm belief that you'll be going somewhere.” 

― Margaret Atwood

“Atticus was right. One time he said you never really know a man 

until you stand in his shoes and walk around in them. 

Just standing on the Radley porch was enough.” 

― Harper Lee

“If the shoe doesn't fit, must we change the foot?” 

― Gloria Steinem

“Even a child with normal feet was in love with the world 

after he had got a new pair of shoes.” 

― Flannery O'Connor

Pointe ballet shoes in Russian ballet school.photo by Petar Milošević

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Midweek Motif ~ Shoes

Once upon a time, there were three princesses who each night wore out a pair of shoes ... but that's not the story I want to tell.  Once upon a time, I had shoes handmade to fit ... and that was the year I started walking my own path.  So for me, shoes have always been both personal and symbolic. 

Helping someone into their own shoes is a loving act.  Throwing a shoe at a President is a major insult, or so I've heard.   Shoe stories stick in my heart and mind.  What about you?

The Challenge:  In your NEW poem, feature shoes in a symbolic narrative

OR describe a pair of old shoes.

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The Shoe Tree, Saughton Skatepark
© Copyright kim traynor

Those Winter Sundays*

BY ROBERT HAYDEN

Sundays too my father got up early 

and put his clothes on in the blueblack cold, 

then with cracked hands that ached 

from labor in the weekday weather made 

banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him. 

I’d wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking. 

When the rooms were warm, he’d call, 

and slowly I would rise and dress, 

fearing the chronic angers of that house, 

Speaking indifferently to him, 

who had driven out the cold 

and polished my good shoes as well. 

What did I know, what did I know 

of love’s austere and lonely offices?

*Both a reading by Hayden and a poem commentary exist at this link.

Shoes

BY ANONYMOUS

My father has a pair of shoes 

So beautiful to see. 

I want to wear my father's shoes. 

They are too big for me. 

My baby brother has a pair 

As cunning as can be. 

My feet won't go into that pair. 

They are too small for me. 

There's only one thing that I can do 

Till I get small or grown. 

If I want to have some fitting shoes 

I'll have to wear my own.

Bessie Dreaming Bear

BY MARNIE WALSH

        (Rosebud, So. Dak., 1960)

we all went to town one day

went to a store

bought you new shoes

red high heels

aint seen you since

(Please forgive me for featuring this splendid poem without permission.)

In USA National Archives, by Charles Henry Alston (1942-45)

The Eyes Wide Open war casualties memorial 

(featuring over 1,500 pairs of empty combat boots)

Photo: Mark Costantini /San Francisco Chronicle

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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 ~ Word.)

Poets United Midweek Motif ~ Flowers

Flower of Life II, 1925, 1918 by Georgia O'Keeffe

"I decided that if I could paint
that flower in a huge scale, you
could not ignore its beauty. ”- Georgia O'Keeffe

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"The earth laughs in flowers.” 

― Ralph Waldo Emerson

“I will be the gladdest thing under the sun! I will touch 
a hundred flowers and not pick one.” 
― Edna St. Vincent Millay

“I sometimes think that never blows so red

The Rose as where some buried Caesar bled;

That every Hyacinth the Garden wears

Dropt in its Lap from some once lovely Head.” 

― Omar Khayyám

The daisy chain by Maude Goodmann (1844-1936)

Midweek Motif ~ Flowers

Flowers hold memories 
and memories hold flowers.

Your Challenge: In a new poem, memorialize a significant encounter with a flower or flowers.

Van Gogh Painting Sunflowers, Paul Gauguin (1888)

In a Burying Ground
by Sara Teasdale

This is the spot where I will lie
When life has had enough of me,
These are the grasses that will blow
Above me like a living sea.

These gay old lilies will not shrink
To draw their life from death of mine,
And I will give my body's fire
To make blue flowers on this vine.

"O Soul," I said, "have you no tears?
Was not the body dear to you?"
I heard my soul say carelessly,
"The myrtle flowers will grow more blue."

The Easter Flower 

by Claude McKay

Far from this foreign Easter damp and chilly
My soul steals to a pear-shaped plot of ground,
Where gleamed the lilac-tinted Easter lily
Soft-scented in the air for yards around;

Alone, without a hint of guardian leaf!
Just like a fragile bell of silver rime,
It burst the tomb for freedom sweet and brief
In the young pregnant year at Eastertime;

And many thought it was a sacred sign,
And some called it the resurrection flower;
And I, a pagan, worshiped at its shrine,
Yielding my heart unto its perfumed power.

Peonies

by Mary Oliver

This morning the green fists of the peonies are getting ready
to break my heart
as the sun rises,
as the sun strokes them with his old, buttery fingers

and they open–
pools of lace,
white and pink–
and all day the black ants climb over them,

boring their deep and mysterious holes
into the curls,
craving the sweet sap,
taking it away

to their dark, underground cities–
and all day
under the shifty wind,
as in a dance to the great wedding,

the flowers bend their bright bodies,
and tip their fragrance to the air,
and rise,
their red stems holding

all that dampness and recklessness
gladly and lightly,
and there it is again–
beauty the brave, the exemplary,

blazing open.
Do you love this world?
Do you cherish your humble and silky life?
Do you adore the green grass, with its terror beneath?

Do you also hurry, half-dressed and barefoot, into the garden,
and softly,
and exclaiming of their dearness,
fill your arms with the white and pink flowers,

with their honeyed heaviness, their lush trembling,
their eagerness
to be wild and perfect for a moment, before they are
nothing, forever?

    (Please forgive me for posting all of "Peony" without permission.  I love it.)  

Every Flower - Noel Paul Stookey with John Payne on saxophone

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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 ~  Smoking Tobacco ~
as 5/31 is World No Tobacco Day.)

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