Greetings, word lovers. I hope this
week finds you healthy, happy, and looking forward to the New Year. In my home,
we are enjoying our Winter Solstice traditions—cooking together, exchanging gifts,
watching Star Wars*cough*, and wishing everyone the best 2020.
2019 has been a year of changes and
endings, as Rosemary shows us in “Wild Fridays: Deaths and Entrances”. If you’ve
yet to read it, do go back and take a look-see. The post doesn’t only reflect
on this year’s happenings, but it also offers glimpses of what’s to come (i.e. we are planning to do some housekeeping, mostly
de-cluttering, organizing, labeling… You will see!).
Did you participate in “Poets United Midweek Motif ~ Year’s End”, or was I the only one who missed it? *sigh* Well, if you
share my slightly delinquent status, today is a great day to revisit Susan’s
topic.
So, dear poets, storytellers, worshipers
of words... our pantry is open for poetry and prose (stories, articles, essays… in 369 words or fewer). Share an old piece or a new one, your choice (our delight).
Note: When we return, on January 5th, this blog will
look different (colors, layout, fonts and such…). Our love for words will remain unchanged.
Nature crafts the best art.
Please, add the direct link to your entry to Mr. Linky.
Visit other lovers of words. Enjoy the Holiday Season (and every day after that).
I am crooning a Tagore
song as I write this prompt ‘Changes’ together
with Susan:
“Fallen leaves, I’m one of you dear.
With much laughter and many a tear
Phagun* chanted the farewell song into my
core.”
(*Phagun / Phalgun is one of the last months
of the Bengali calendar.)
This year now rolls into its
last month. There is an aroma of change everywhere; in every sphere of life. So
it is in our dearest home Poets United. Mary and Sherry left in October, and both Susan and I are taking leave of
Midweek Motif this December:
“The poetry of earth is ceasing
never:
On a lone winter evening, when the
frost
Has wrought a
silence, from the stove there shrills
The Cricket’s song, in warmth
increasing ever,
And seems to one in
drowsiness half lost,
The Grasshopper’s
among some grassy hills.”
Our last prompt will be 18 December 2019, though we will continue to write and blog our poetry. We will write more about this change in Rosemary's feature this Friday. So stay tuned, and stay in tune, too, for your
new Wednesday prompt hosts in January 2020.
We try to learn to appreciate change, as it cannot be avoided. We would have to set life in bronze or stone or amber to preserve it. Would it then be alive? Can we then celebrate change, or at least find the words to recognize its power? Adrienne Rich wrote in "Images for Godard":
the mind of the poet is changing
the moment of change is the only poem.
What do you think?
Here are more poems to inspire you as you find the poetry in change:
Want the change. Be inspired by the flame
where everything shines as it disappears.
The artist, when sketching, loves nothing so much
as the curve of the body as it turns away.
What locks itself in sameness has congealed.
Is it safer to be gray and numb?
What turns hard becomes rigid
and is easily shattered.
Pour yourself out like a fountain.
Flow into the knowledge that what you are seeking
finishes often at the start, and, with ending, begins.
Every happiness is the child of a separation
it did not think it could survive. And Daphne, becoming a laurel,
dares you to become the wind.
One day you finally knew
what you had to do, and began,
though the voices around you
kept shouting
their bad advice – – –
though the whole house
began to tremble
and you felt the old tug
at your ankles.
‘Mend my life!’
each voice cried.
But you didn’t stop.
You knew what you had to do,
though the wind pried
with its stiff fingers
at the very foundations – – –
though their melancholy
was terrible. It was already late
enough, and a wild night,
and the road full of fallen
branches and stones.
But little by little,
as you left their voices behind,
the stars began to burn
through the sheets of clouds,
and there was a new voice,
which you slowly
recognized as your own,
that kept you company
as you strode deeper and deeper
into the world,
determined to do
the only thing you could do – – – determined to save
the only life you could save.
