Poets United Midweek Motif ~ Bicycles, Tricycles or Unicycles

Girl on a Bicycle  (1987), by British sculptor Sydney Harpley 
in Singapore Botanic Gardens

"Get a bicycle. You will not regret it. If you live". 

~Mark Twain, "Taming the Bicycle"

“Let me tell you what I think of bicycling. I think it has done more to emancipate women than anything else in the world. It gives women a feeling of freedom and self-reliance.” 

― Susan B. Anthony

"The bicycle is the most civilized conveyance known to man. Other forms of transport grow daily more nightmarish. Only the bicycle remains pure in heart." 

~Iris Murdoch, The Red and the Green

When I see an adult on a bicycle, I do not despair for the future of the human race. 

~H.G. Wells

Photo credit: Ken Looi, Adventure Unicyclist

Midweek Motif  ~ Bicycles, 

Tricycles or Unicycles 

This year is the 200th anniversary of the bicycle, introduced in  Germany in 1817.  The unicycle is a few decades newer and the tricycle is a few years older.  And, it may be International Bike Week or Month--or I may have the date wrong--but the idea of the event is to promote sustainable urban transportation.  For transport, for sport and for play--do you feel the push and pull of cycling?  

source

Your Challenge: There are far fewer poems with a cycling motif than  

there should be.  

Let's fix that!

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Ode to Bicycles

by Pablo Neruda

. . . . 

A few bicycles
passed
me by,
the only
insects
in
that dry
moment of summer,
silent,
swift,
translucent;
they
barely stirred
the air.

Workers and girls
were riding to their
factories,
giving
their eyes
to summer,
their heads to the sky,
sitting on the
hard
beetle backs
of the whirling
bicycles
that whirred as they rode by
bridges, rosebushes, brambles
and midday.

source

. . . . 

(Read the rest HERE.)

Dio Ed Io

Related Poem Content Details

BY CHARLES WRIGHT

. . . . 

There is a picture of Yves Klein leaping out of a window   

Above a cobblestone Paris street.   

A man on a bicycle peddles away toward the distance.   

One of them's you, the other is me.   

Cut out of the doctored photograph, however, the mesh net   

Right under the swan-diving body.   

Cut out of another print, the black-capped, ever-distancing cyclist, as well as the mesh net.   

Hmm . . . And there you have it, two-fingered sleight-of-hand man.   

One loses one's center in the air, trying to stay afloat,   

Doesn't one? Snowfalling metaphors.   

Unbidden tears, the off-size of small apples. Unshed.   

And unshedable.   

Such heaviness. The world has come and lies between us.   

Such distance. Ungraspable.   

Ash and its disappearance—   

Unbearable absence of being,   

                                           Tonto, then taken back.

(Read the rest HERE.)

Livingston Taylor - Bicycle - Green Bike in Hereford

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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 ~ Flowers.)

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