Creation (February 11)

 

Creation

Source

In a time of destruction, create something: a poem, a parade, a community, a school, a vow, a moral principle; one peaceful moment.

~Maxine Hong Kingston The Fifth Book of Peace (2003)

All powers have two sides, the power to create and the power to destroy.

 We must recognize them both, but invest our gifts on the side of creation.

~Robin Wall Kimmerer Braiding Sweetgrass (2013)

Oh yes! Create happiness and well-being, create home and welcome, create books and poems, create play or song.  Today, you may find yourself moved to poetry by the need to create, or by ideas of creation, or "the creation" in various mythologies.  You choose.  

Excerpts from three example poems are below.

The Creation

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James Weldon Johnson

1871 –

1938

And God stepped out on space,
And he looked around and said:
I'm lonely—
I'll make me a world.

And far as the eye of God could see
Darkness covered everything,
Blacker than a hundred midnights
Down in a cypress swamp.

Then God smiled,
And the light broke,
And the darkness rolled up on one side,
And the light stood shining on the other,
And God said: That's good!

Then God reached out and took the light in his hands,
And God rolled the light around in his hands
Until he made the sun;
And he set that sun a-blazing in the heavens.
And the light that was left from making the sun
God gathered it up in a shining ball
And flung it against the darkness,
Spangling the night with the moon and stars.
Then down between
The darkness and the light
He hurled the world;
And God said: That's good!

(Read the rest HERE.)

From God's Trombones by James Weldon Johnson. Copyright © 1927 The Viking Press, Inc., renewed 1955 by Grace Nail Johnson. 

America, I Sing You Back

By Allison Adelle Hedge Coke

for Phil Young and my father Robert Hedge Coke; for Whitman and Hughes

America, I sing back. Sing back what sung you in.

Sing back the moment you cherished breath.

Sing you home into yourself and back to reason.

 

Before America began to sing, I sung her to sleep,

held her cradleboard, wept her into day.

My song gave her creation, prepared her delivery,

held her severed cord beautifully beaded.

 

My song helped her stand, held her hand for first steps,

nourished her very being, fed her, placed her three sisters strong.

(Read the rest HERE.)

The Work of Happiness

By May Sarton

I thought of happiness, how it is woven

Out of the silence in the empty house each day

And how it is not sudden and it is not given

But is creation itself like the growth of a tree.

No one has seen it happen, but inside the bark

Another circle is growing in the expanding ring.

No one has heard the root go deeper in the dark,

But the tree is lifted by this inward work

And its plumes shine, and its leaves are glittering.

(Read the rest HERE.)

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