Poets United Midweek Motif ~ The Food We Eat

“One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well.”
― Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own

10/16 is World Food Day. 

 “There are people in the world so hungry, that God cannot appear to them except in the form of bread.”
― Mahatma Gandhi

“Let food be thy medicine and medicine be thy food.”
― Hippocrates 

Midweek Motif ~ The Food We Eat

What is your Recipe for a Healthy Life?  
What foods do you eat (or wish you were eating)??  

Go to the links above to read about World Food Day.  Or simply answer the question(s) literally or conceptually ~ with luscious details, of course ~ in a brand new poem.  I hope you find the quotes, poems and illustrations inspiring!

"Eat in company, and cook at home.  It's good for your health."

This Is Just To Say

By William Carlos Williams

I have eaten

the plums

that were in

the icebox

and which

you were probably

saving

for breakfast

Forgive me

they were delicious

so sweet

and so cold

Sliced fruit

Cutting greens

By Lucille Clifton

curling them around

i hold their bodies in obscene embrace

thinking of everything but kinship.

collards and kale

strain against each strange other

away from my kissmaking hand and

the iron bedpot.

the pot is black,

the cutting board is black,

my hand,

and just for a minute

the greens roll black under the knife,

and the kitchen twists dark on its spine

and I taste in my natural appetite

the bond of live things everywhere.

Kale (left) and Collard Greens (right)

I Ask My Grandmother If We Can Make Lahmajoun (excerpt)

By Gregory Djanikian

. . . .   

we sprinkle the flour on the kitchen table   

and it is snowing on Ararat   

we sprinkle the flour and the memory   

of winter is in our eyes   

we roll the dough out   

into small circles   

pale moons over   

every empty village   

Kevork is standing on a chair   

and singing   

O my Armenian girl

my spirit longs to be nearer

Nevrig is warming the oven   

and a dry desert breeze   

is skimming over the rooftops   

toward the sea   

we are spreading the lahma

on the ajoun with our fingers   

whispering into it the histories   

of those who have none 
. . . .

(Read the rest HERE.)
 

Lahmajoun,Turkish and Armenian

Eating Fried Chicken

By Linh Dinh
 

I hate to admit this, brother, but there are times

When I’m eating fried chicken

When I think about nothing else but eating fried chicken,

When I utterly forget about my family, honor and country,

The various blood debts you owe me,

My past humiliations and my future crimes—

Everything, in short, but the crispy skin on my fried chicken.

But I’m not altogether evil, there are also times

When I will refuse to lick or swallow anything

That’s not generally available to mankind.

(Which is, when you think about it, absolutely nothing at all.)

And no doubt that’s why apples can cause riots,

And meat brings humiliation,

And each gasp of air

Will fill one’s lungs with gun powder and smoke.

Fried Chicken

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 ~ Forgiveness.)

Poets United Midweek Motif ~ Colour (Color)

Color effect – Sunlight shining through stained glass onto carpet
(Nasir ol Molk Mosque located in Shiraz, Iran)

“Clouds come floating into my life, no longer to carry rain or usher storm, but to add color to my sunset sky.”
― Rabindranath Tagore

“I think it pisses God off if you walk by the color purple in a field somewhere and don't notice it.”― Alice Walker

“One should be a painter. As a writer, I feel the beauty, which is almost entirely colour, very subtle, very changeable, running over my pen, as if you poured a large jug of champagne over a hairpin.”― Virginia Woolf

"ME TOO" by Annell Livingston:
"Hold the world as tenderly as a lover."
(Used with permission.)

Midweek Motif ~ Color (Colour)

Working on this prompt is brightening my world! Today, I share words from Annell Livingston who created the "Me Too" acrylic painting above:  

I have been studying color for over fifty years.  And color is like exploring a cave deep underground, the doors or passageways keep opening, just when you think you have a handle on the subject, another door opens and presents new possibilities.  We begin with the hues of color, or the names of each color, like red, yellow and blue.  The lights and darks of color, tints and shades.  The temperature of color, warm or cool.   And the intensity of color, or the brightness or dullness of color.  There is so much to explore about color and its vibrations, it is a lifetime study.

Today, I'm inviting us to question how color around us shapes our moods and how our moods influence our environments.

The Challenge:  In your brand new poem, reveal the color of a place or an event.

Angostura de Paine, Chile. By Ricardo Hurtubia

The Art Room

BY SHARA MCCALLUM

for my sisters

Because we did not have threads

of turquoise, silver, and gold,

we could not sew a sun nor sky.

And our hands became balls of fire.

And our arms spread open like wings.

Because we had no chalk or pastels,

no toad, forest, or morning-grass slats

of paper, we had no colour

for creatures. So we squatted

and sprang, squatted and sprang.

Four young girls, plaits heavy

on our backs, our feet were beating

drums, drawing rhythms from the floor;

our mouths became woodwinds;

our tongues touched teeth and were reeds.

(Used with permission of the poet.)

First appeared in Song of Thieves 
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2003

Colors passing through us

BY MARGE PIERCY

Purple as tulips in May, mauve

into lush velvet, purple

as the stain blackberries leave

on the lips, on the hands,

the purple of ripe grapes

sunlit and warm as flesh.

Every day I will give you a color,

like a new flower in a bud vase

on your desk. Every day

I will paint you, as women

color each other with henna

on hands and on feet.

Red as henna, as cinnamon,

as coals after the fire is banked,

the cardinal in the feeder,

the roses tumbling on the arbor

their weight bending the wood

the red of the syrup I make from petals.

Orange as the perfumed fruit

hanging their globes on the glossy tree,

orange as pumpkins in the field,

orange as butterflyweed and the monarchs

who come to eat it, orange as my

cat running lithe through the high grass.

Yellow as a goat’s wise and wicked eyes,

yellow as a hill of daffodils,

yellow as dandelions by the highway,

yellow as butter and egg yolks,

yellow as a school bus stopping you,

yellow as a slicker in a downpour.

. . . . 

(Read the rest of this marvelous poem HERE.)

Colorful fall foliage in New York.

In a London Drawingroom

                          BY GEORGE ELIOT

The sky is cloudy, yellowed by the smoke. 

For view there are the houses opposite 

Cutting the sky with one long line of wall 

Like solid fog: far as the eye can stretch 

Monotony of surface & of form 

Without a break to hang a guess upon. 

No bird can make a shadow as it flies, 

For all is shadow, as in ways o'erhung 

By thickest canvass, where the golden rays 

Are clothed in hemp. No figure lingering 

Pauses to feed the hunger of the eye 

Or rest a little on the lap of life. 

All hurry on & look upon the ground, 

Or glance unmarking at the passers by 

The wheels are hurrying too, cabs, carriages 

All closed, in multiplied identity. 

The world seems one huge prison-house & court 

Where men are punished at the slightest cost, 

With lowest rate of colour, warmth & joy. 

In the Bois de Boulogne by Berthe Morisot (1880)

Pied Beauty 

BY GERARD MANLEY HOPKINS

Glory be to God for dappled things – 

   For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow; 

      For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim; 

Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings; 

   Landscape plotted and pieced – fold, fallow, and plough; 

      And áll trádes, their gear and tackle and trim. 

All things counter, original, spare, strange; 

   Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?) 

      With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim; 

He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change: 

                                Praise him.

🌈

 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 ~ Treasure)

Poets United Midweek Motif ~ Meteor Showers

Fireball from the 1998 Leonid meteor shower on Nov. 17,
Photo by astrophotographer Lorenzo Lovato, 1998. (SPACE.com)

"The night is falling down around us. Meteors rain like fireworks, quick rips in the seam of the dark.... Every second, another streak of silver glows: parentheses, exclamation points, commas—a whole grammar made of light, 
for words too hard to speak.” 
― Jodi Picoult, My Sister's Keeper

“I would rather be a superb meteor, every atom of me                     
in magnificent glow, than a sleepy and permanent planet.” 
― Jack London

“Better was it to go unknown and leave behind you an arch, then to burn like a meteor and leave no dust.” 
-- Virginia Woolf

The November Meteors by Étienne Léopold Trouvelot, 1868

Midweek Motif ~ Meteor Showers

According to Wikipedia: 

A meteor shower is a celestial event in which a number of meteors are observed to radiate, or originate, from one point in the night sky.  . . .   The first great storm in the modern era was the Leonids of November 1833. One estimate is over one hundred thousand meteors an hour,^[3] but another, done as the storm abated, estimated in excess of two hundred thousand meteors during the 9 hours of storm^[4] over the entire region of North America east of the Rocky Mountains.  

Imagine that!
or have you actually seen them?  

(In November, because the single point of origin is 

in the constellation Leo, they are called the Leonids.)  

Your Challenge:  Employ a meteor shower or a meteor in your new poem, whether historical, fantastical or metaphorical.  

Old woodcuts depicting 1833 Leonid meteor storm.

November’s Leonid meteor shower By Deborah Byrd 

in ASTRONOMY ESSENTIALS  11/15/2017 EarthSky

Here are all the details you need for 

2017’s Leonid meteor shower, 
November 17 and 18.

The Meteorite

C.S. Lewis

Among the hills a meteorite

Lies huge; and moss has overgrown,

And wind and rain with touches light

Made soft, the contours of the stone.

Thus easily can Earth digest

A cinder of sidereal fire,

And make her translunary guest

The native of an English shire.

Nor is it strange these wanderers

Find in her lap their fitting place,

For every particle that's hers

Came at the first from outer space.

All that is Earth has once been sky;

Down from the sun of old she came,

Or from some star that travelled by

Too close to his entangling flame.

Hence, if belated drops yet fall

From heaven, on these her plastic power

Still works as once it worked on all

The glad rush of the golden shower.

🌠

August 12 in the Nebraska Sand Hills Watching the Perseids Meteor Shower

 TWYLA HANSEN

In the middle of rolling grasslands, away from lights,

a moonless night untethers its wild polka-dots,

the formations we can name competing for attention

in a twinkling and crowded sky-bowl.

Out from the corners, our eyes detect a maverick meteor,

a transient streak, and lying back toward midnight

on the heft of car hood, all conversation blunted,

we are at once unnerved and somehow restored.

. . . . 

(Read the rest HERE.)

2003: The Leonid meteor shower

The Tyger

BY WILLIAM BLAKE

Tyger Tyger, burning bright, 

In the forests of the night; 

What immortal hand or eye, 

Could frame thy fearful symmetry? 

In what distant deeps or skies. 

Burnt the fire of thine eyes? 

On what wings dare he aspire? 

What the hand, dare seize the fire? 

And what shoulder, & what art, 

Could twist the sinews of thy heart? 

And when thy heart began to beat, 

What dread hand? & what dread feet? 

What the hammer? what the chain, 

In what furnace was thy brain? 

What the anvil? what dread grasp, 

Dare its deadly terrors clasp! 

When the stars threw down their spears 

And water'd heaven with their tears: 

Did he smile his work to see? 

Did he who made the Lamb make thee? 

Tyger Tyger burning bright, 

In the forests of the night: 

What immortal hand or eye, 

Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?

🌠

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 ~ The Flower: Rose)