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What gets you angry? What can you do about it? I pulled together a few quotes about anger and one very angry poem. (There's lots more quotes at WikiQuotes.) But you can skip all this reading, and just move on with the first story that comes to mind. What anger needs expression?
In a poem, illuminate a moment or duration
of anger with your words and images.
Anger Quotes:
- Great, strong, spiritual love — which is always at the same time a genuine, unsentimental love of man — cannot be without wrath. … Anger can no more be separated from love than flame and heat can from fire. Love and anger are a single fire of the Spirit.
- Constantin Brunner, Our Christ : The Revolt of the Mystical Genius (1921), as translated by Graham Harrison and Michael Wex, edited by A. M. Rappaport, p. 169.
- I have learnt through bitter experience the one supreme lesson to conserve my anger, and as heat conserved is transmuted into energy, even so our anger controlled can be transmuted into a power which can move the world.
- Mahatma Gandhi. Young India (September 15, 1920), reprinted in Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi, Vol. 21 (electronic edition), p. 252.
- Anger expressed and translated into action in the service of our vision and our future is a liberating and strengthening act of clarification, for it is in the painful process of this translation that we identify who are our allies with whom we have grave differences, and who are our genuine enemies.
- Audre Lorde, The Uses of Anger: Women Responding to Racism, Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches. Crossing Press. 1984. ISBN 978-0-89594-142-8.
- I was angry with my friend:
I told my wrath, my wrath did end.
I was angry with my foe;
I told it not, my wrath did grow.- William Blake, Christian Forbearance.
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I
When in a farmhouse kitchen that smelled
of old rinds and wet cigarette butts
I hoisted the shotgun to my shoulder
and aimed but did not fire it at the man
who had just taken my virginity like a snack,
with my collusion, but still —
When I sat in a conference room
in an inquisition
at the “newspaper of record,”
across from the one slurping his pipe,
the one arching her eyebrow,
and I felt the heat like a wet brand in my chest,
repaid insult for insult and left their fancy job
like a squashed bug on the floor —
When I was twelve, too old, the last time my father
spanked me, pants down,
because I had “distressed” my mother
and my vision went red-black and
I did not forgive —
When, during my travels along the Gulf Coast,
the intruder returned in the night
and I did not call the cops again but stood
with a butcher knife facing the door, yelling, “Come in!”
although this time it was just the wind flapping
and banging the screen door —
When across a skating-rink-sized glistening table
I told the committee chair and her brooch I was a fan of Marx
and lost the fellowship —
When I threw a pot of hot coffee
and it just missed a man’s head, and the black-brown spatter stains
were still there four years later long after he’d left me
when I finally moved out of that East Village hole —
II
I would have had to be thinking
in order to have thought — loaded, not loaded?
— and I was not thinking, I was only dripping hot
and oh the pleasure, I can still feel its prickling,
crackle over the furnace of my rage,
to see his face go pale, his eyes widen,
his “put it down, put it down” — and I
put it down and allowed my life as well as his
to go on.
III
I miss my anger. Decades go by
when all I can muster is absent-minded invective,
you know, directed at the news;
or a brief fantasy
of shoving someone in front of a bus. Yesterday
I slammed my fist on my desk
and then apologized, to the desk.
Consider the tapestry of the seven deadly sins, at Saint-Denis:
Anger, wild-haired and half-dressed,
picked out in blue and silver thread bunched
against the crimson,
rough against the fingertips, she
rides a black boar dappled with blood
and waves her double-headed axe —
Yes, I remember her.
I always lie when I always say
I didn’t know the gun was loaded.
💚💚💚
Please link one poem that is your response to the material of this prompt. After you link your poem, please visit others.
Don't forget to include this link in your post.
