Greetings! and welcome to Poets United Midweek Motif. Susan took a wee break, so
I’m filling in today. She sends you her love and promises to be back (to tempt our muses) on
the first week of August.
Today’s
prompt, not-so-old-fashioned “Hobbies”, was inspired by my reaction to a
pamphlet (from an organization that shan’t be
named). The document in question calls
gardening, baking, sewing, dancing and poetry writing “old-fashioned hobbies”.
After I was done being outraged (gardening
and poetry writing aren’t hobbies, thanks very much!), I thought that it might be nice to write poems about
hobbies or life-giving activities, which some might consider
old-fashioned *cough*.
So,
dear poets, I invite you to write a new poem using not-so-old-fashioned hobbies, such as gardening or
baking or sewing or dancing or candle making or poetry writing… or, well, pretty
much any activity you do regularly (which
brings you pleasure) as a foundation.
Three
glimpses from poems around the web:
from “The Song of the Shirt”, by Thomas Hood (this version appears at the beginning of The Poison Thread:
A Novel, by Laura Purcell).
Oh, Men, with Sisters dear!
Oh, Men, with Mothers and Wives!
It is not the linen you’re wearing out,
But the human creatures’ lives!
Stitch – stitch – stitch,
In poverty, hunger and dirt,
Sewing at once, with a double thread,
A Shroud as well as a Shirt.
But why do I talk of Death?
That Phantom of grisly bone,
I hardly fear its terrible shape,
It seems so like my own –
from “Digging Potatoes, Sebago, Maine”, by Amy E. King
Your blade emerges
with a mob of
them, tawny freckled knobs,
an earthworm
curling over one like a tentacle.
I always want to
clean them with my tongue,
to taste in this
dark mud, in its sparkled scatter
of mica and stone
chips, its soft genealogy
of birch bark and fiddleheads …
from “Embroidery”, Louise Hayley
Over and under
The white disappears
The lines take shape and
A picture appears
Add
the direct link to your new poem to Mr. Linky. Enjoy yourselves. Delight in the poetry of others
(and tell them about it).
When
Susan returns (August 7th!), her Midweek Motif will be: Safety.
