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 ~ 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. 

🌳 

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.)

Poets United Midweek Motif ~ "a bundle of contradictions" (from Anne Frank's last letter)

I am very conscious of the fact that our feelings and strivings are often contradictory and obscure and that they cannot be expressed in easy and simple formulas.

~ Albert Einstein

In love all the contradictions of existence merge themselves and are lost. Only in love are unity and duality not at variance. Love must be one and two at the same time.                                                                                                                              ~ Rabindranath Tagore

Anne Frank dated her last diary entry 1 August 1944. Here it is, edited by Otto H. Frank and Mirjam Pressler, and translated by Susan Massotty.  

This is an excerpt:

"Dearest Kitty, 

". . . Can you please tell me exactly what "a bundle of contradictions" is? What does "contradiction" mean? Like so many words, it can be interpreted in two ways: a contradiction imposed from without and one imposed from within. The former means not accepting other people's opinions, always knowing best, having the last word; in short, all those unpleasant traits for which I'm known. The latter, for which I'm not known, is my own secret. As I've told you many times, I'm split in two. One side contains my exuberant cheerfulness, my flippancy, my joy in life and, above all, my ability to appreciate the lighter side of things. By that I mean not finding anything wrong with flirtations, a kiss, an embrace, an off-color joke. This side of me is usually lying in wait to ambush the other one, which is much purer, deeper and finer. . . ." 

💕

Midweek Motif ~ 

"a bundle of contradictions" 

(see here a very loud silence)

Your Challenge:  Make one new poem with the motif "a bundle of contradictions."  Alternatively, make a new poem with a motif inspired by Anne Frank.

Anne Frank Huis

BY ANDREW MOTION

Even now, after twice her lifetime of grief

and anger in the very place, whoever comes

to climb these narrow stairs, discovers how

the bookcase slides aside, then walks through

shadow into sunlit room, can never help

but break her secrecy again. Just listening

is a kind of guilt: the Westerkirk repeats

itself outside, as if all time worked round

towards her fear, and made each stroke

die down on guarded streets. Imagine it—

four years of whispering, and loneliness

. . . . 

(Read the rest HERE.)

From Song of Myself 

            BY WALT WHITMAN

51

The past and present wilt—I have fill’d them, emptied them,

And proceed to fill my next fold of the future.

Listener up there! what have you to confide to me?

Look in my face while I snuff the sidle of evening,

(Talk honestly, no one else hears you, and I stay only a minute longer.)

Do I contradict myself?

Very well then I contradict myself,

(I am large, I contain multitudes.)

I concentrate toward them that are nigh, I wait on the door-slab.

Who has done his day’s work? who will soonest be through with his supper?

Who wishes to walk with me?

Will you speak before I am gone? will you prove already too late?

Drawing Hands by M.C. Escher (1948)

💕

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 ~ of poems.)