Power

The Power of Sleeping

Today’s topic is about Power. Power could lead one to the gate of Authority, Resistance and Resilience or even to the Institutional Power house. One could go on and on and find different facets of Power. Given the current situation of the world, ‘love of power’ has become an epithet that could be attributed to countless political leaders all over the world. W.H. Auden’s poem “Epitaph on a Tyrant” comes to mind in this connection that describes a murderous narcissist. It reads like this:

Perfection, of a kind, was what he was after,
And the poetry he invented was easy to understand;
He knew human folly like the back of his hand,
And was greatly interested in armies and fleets;
When he laughed, respectable senators burst with laughter,
And when he cried the little children died in the streets.

Political dominance cannot be the be all and end all of this civilization. We do need to celebrate ‘endurance’ as the power of resilience and survival as well; or the power of Love; the overwhelming power of Beauty; Time; Education. The list is endless.

So how does the word ‘power’ appeal to you?

Some Power-Poems:

Time

by Allen Curnow

 I have never seen “Volcanoes”—175

by Emily Dickinson

 

I have never seen "Volcanoes" —

But, when Travellers tell

How those old — phlegmatic mountains

Usually so still —

 

Bear within — appalling Ordnance,

Fire, and smoke, and gun,

Taking Villages for breakfast,

And appalling Men —

 

If the stillness is Volcanic

In the human face

When upon a pain Titanic

Features keep their place —

 

If at length the smouldering anguish

Will not overcome —

And the palpitating Vineyard

In the dust, be thrown?

 

If some loving Antiquary,

On Resumption Morn,

Will not cry with joy "Pompeii"!

To the Hills return!

A Chorus

by Elizabeth Jennings

Please share your poem using Mr. Linky below and visit others in the spirit of the community. Please include this link in your post.

Sadness

 

Sadness

Write a poem that explores sadness not necessarily as a single feeling, but as something you might experience or live with,.

It can be about sadnesss in general or about a specific thing that causes sadness.  

A few ideas:

1. Where are you when you experience sadness?  Is it a room, a season, a memory, a body?

What does sadness sound like there—silence, repetition, something distant?
Let the poem express the small details.

2. Consider what is unsaid. about sadness.  Is sadness sharp or dull or pounding?

You might write about:

• a quiet moment after something has ended
• a conversation that never happened
• something once joyful that no longer is

Try to write so the reader will feel the sadness.  Allow the poem not to have an easy resolution. Let it end in a way that feels true rather than resolved. In your poem, you don'thave to make the sadness go away.  Feel free to let the sadness just hang there.  Sometimes sadness is that way.  

I could look for poems on sadness as examples, but I decided to let you discover your own if you wish to do a google search.  I don't know about you, but often example poems  do not help me write.  Think SADNESS, and go from there.

After you write your poem, link it using Mr. Linky below.  Then please visit the poems of others who post. The prompt will close Sunday at 8 p.m. Eastern Time.  

I look forward to reading what you come up with.  

SOLASTALGIA

 

source

Solastalgia is the emotional or existential distress caused by negative, environmental change to one's home landscape while still residing there. This form of "homesickness at home" stems from the loss of solace, security, and connection to a familiar environment due to factors like climate change, pollution, or industrial or residential development. I imagine extreme political change might factor in there as well. Life just doesn't feel as safe any more.

What are you missing, in your heart of hearts? Can you pinpoint what this internal homesickness is about? The way the world was in childhood? The way the climate was twenty (or 40) years ago, compared to today's extreme weather events? Has development removed forests and trails from your neighbourhood? Has the countryside turned into condominium developments and strip malls?

Let's set our pens free and share what we are nostalgic for. Joy Harjo has the gift of writing that inner ache in a way that meets an echoing pang in the reader.

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THE LAST SONG
by Joy Harjo

how can you stand it
he said
the hot Oklahoma summers
where you were born
this humid thick air
is choking me
and i want to go back
to New Mexico

it is the only way
i know how to breathe
an ancient chant
that my mother knew
came out of a history
woven from wet tall grass
in her womb
and i know no other way
than to surround my voice
with the summer songs of crickets
in this moist south night air

oklahoma will be the last song
i’ll ever sing

 

As the climate crisis progresses with very little being done to address it, I looked for a poem offering some hope to the reader. I found it in a poet referred to in an interview by the well-known poet Ada Limon. The poem reminds us that, no matter what we foolish humans are doing, Mother Earth continues on her endless cycles, everything geared towards growth and survival, if only we would support her in her efforts.

REASONS TO LIVE
by Ruth Awad

Because if you can survive
the violet night, you can survive

the next, and the fig tree will ache
with sweetness for you in sunlight that arrives

first at your window, quietly pawing
even when you can't stand it,

and you'll heavy the whining floorboards
of the house you filled with animals

as hurt and lost as you, and the bearded irises will form
fully in their roots, their golden manes

swaying with the want of spring —
live, live, live, live! —

one day you'll put your hands in the earth
and understand an afterlife isn't promised,

but the spray of scorpion grass keeps growing,
and the dogs will sing their whole bodies

in praise of you, and the redbuds will lay
down their pink crowns, and the rivers

will set their stones and ribbons
at your door if only

you'll let the world
soften you with its touching.

I'm looking forward to your poems. Do check back for those who link later in the week. The prompt is up until 8 p.m. Detroit time on Sunday.

Pets I have known

One Pet, Two pets, 

a Menagerie

source

I hope this is a gentle subject today, though love may be fierce and loss a disaster.  

Think of pets you have known and pick one or more of them to feature in a poem.  Make us see them--and sense them in other ways as well.

Enjoy!

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The cat’s song

By Marge Piercy

Mine, says the cat, putting out his paw of darkness.

My lover, my friend, my slave, my toy, says

the cat making on your chest his gesture of drawing

milk from his mother’s forgotten breasts.

Let us walk in the woods, says the cat.

I’ll teach you to read the tabloid of scents,

to fade into shadow, wait like a trap, to hunt.

Now I lay this plump warm mouse on your mat.

(Read the rest HERE.)

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The Storm (Bear)

by Mary Oliver

Now through the white orchard my little dog
romps, breaking the new snow
with wild feet.
Running here, running there, excited,
hardly able to stop, he leaps, he spins
until the white snow is written upon
in large, exuberant letters,
a long sentence, expressing
the pleasures of the body in this world.

Oh, I could not have said it better
myself.

-Mary Oliver, in “Dog Songs”

source

Walking the Dog
by Howard Nemerov

Two universes mosey down the street
Connected by love and a leash and nothing else.
Mostly I look at lamplight through the leaves
While he mooches along with tail up and snout down,
Getting a secret knowledge through the nose
Almost entirely hidden from my sight.

We stand while he’s enraptured by a bush
Till I can’t stand our standing any more
And haul him off; for our relationship
Is patience balancing to this side tug
And that side drag; a pair of symbionts
Contented not to think each other’s thoughts.

What else we have in common’s what he taught,
Our interest in shit. We know its every state
From steaming fresh through stink to nature’s way
Of sluicing it downstreet dissolved in rain
Or drying it to dust that blows away.
We move along the street inspecting shit.

His sense of it is keener far than mine,
And only when he finds the place precise
He signifies by sniffing urgently
And circles thrice about, and squats, and shits,
Whereon we both with dignity walk home
And just to show who’s master I write the poem.

💙💙💙

Please link one poem that is your response to this prompt.  

After you link your poem, please visit others,

and

Don't forget to include this link in your post.

When Nature Takes Your Breath Away

Source

This week I am turning to Nature. I came upon this magnificent sight on GEOLOGYSCIENCE’s YouTube channel.

Their thumbnail read : Lake Hillier, Australia’s Pink Wonder.

Lake Hillier is particularly notable for its vibrant pink color caused by the presence of the organism Dunaliella salina, red algae, red halophilic bacteria and other microbes in the salt crusts. It’s really an extremely salty lake tucked away on the edge of Middle Island off the south coast of Western Australia. This rosy spot, by the side of the vast blue ocean does make a spectacular sight.

 The color doesn’t alter when the water is taken in a container. Wikipedia compares the lake to a solid, pink bubble gum when seen from above. There are airplane-scenic-flights for the enthusiastic tourists.

Your challenge today is to capture your wonderment in your lines when nature takes your breath away. It might be any unbelievable nature-scene or Lake Hillier itself or any other pink lake of the world. Your theme could also be about the pink color, airplane-scenic-flights, excited tourists, not necessarily connected with the lake. You could include the microbes of the lake in your poem too so that they don’t feel left out. After all they are doing something too magical to be real. 

Here are some nature poems:

 A Maple Leaf

by Margaret E. Sangster 

So bright in death I used to say,
        So beautiful through frost and cold!
A lovelier thing I know to-day,
        The leaf is growing old,
And wears in grace of duty done,
The gold and scarlet of the sun.

There Will Come Soft Rains (War Time)

by Sara Teasdale

 There will come soft rains and the smell of the ground,

And swallows circling with their shimmering sound;

And frogs in the pools singing at night,
And wild plum-trees in tremulous white;

Robins will wear their feathery fire
Whistling their whims on a low fence-wire;

And not one will know of the war, not one
Will care at last when it is done.

Not one would mind, neither bird nor tree
If mankind perished utterly;

And Spring herself, when she woke at dawn,

Would scarcely know that we were gone.

Please share your poem using Mr. Linky below and visit others in the spirit of the community. Please include this link in your post.

Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow

                                           

                                                                   source

Write a poem of THREE stanzas only.  Begin the first stanza with the word "Yesterday" or "Yesterday's."  Begin the second stanza with the word "Today" or "Today's."  And begin the third stanza with the word "Tomorrow" or "Tomorrow's."

Ideas:  

Write one stanza about yesterday's forest, one about today's forest, and one about tomorrow's forest.

Write one stanza about yesterday's friendship, one about today's friendship, and one about tomorrow's friendship.

Write one stanza about yesterdays car, one about today's car, and one about tomorrow's car.

Write one stanza about yesterday's goals, one about today's goals, one about tomorrow's goals.

Anyway, you get the idea:  THREE stanzas only.  Past, present, and future.

When you have written your poem, link it with Mr. Linky below.  And be sure to visit the poems of others who share.

This prompt will close Sunday night at 8 pm Eastern.

THIS POEM

WHAT THIS POEM WILL DO
by Anne Haines

This poem cannot bring you back.
This poem cannot make the clouds
move more quickly or slowly in the sky,
cannot change the weather. This poem
cannot return you to a happy childhood,
erase a painful one. This poem will
not clear your skin, condition your hair,
wash your dishes, mend your jeans.
It won’t find you a lover, not even
if you recite it three times backwards.
It won’t even find me a lover
and I wrote the thing. This poem won’t
stop time, email your advisor for that extension,
pay the plumber or the piper. This
poem does not pay its taxes. It is not
a good citizen. It fails to vote
or show up for jury duty.
This poem will overturn your scrabble game,
take a bite from every food and leave
the rest. This poem is not housebroken.
All night you hear it whining,
missing its mother, chewing your best shoes
and begging to be let out.

Hello, friends. I enjoyed this poem so much I thought it might be fun this week to start off
with the words "This poem...." and see where it takes us. I have done it many times
over the years, and it can be surprising to see where it goes from where it starts out.

Anne Haines' poem lists things a poem cannot do, and I love how she closes with the poem being like a whining puppy. (All those times I have to get out of bed to write lines down before I forget them!) But we could also write what a poem CAN do. "It can't do this, but it can do that...."

This approach allows us to go as deeply or lightly as we wish, to include whatever is happening or interests us in this moment. Let's start tapping at the keys and see where This Poem takes us! 

I am really looking forward to the results!! Here is another example, using the Boomerang Metaphor format created by Hannah Gosselin some years ago at Real Toads. It is penned by Susie Clevenger, whom some of us remember from Poets United and Imaginary Gardens With Real Toads. Susie writes at Black Ink Howl, and kindly gave me permission to use it:

This Poem Is A Blue Pool

This poem is a pool

This poem is vulnerable.

This poem is trust.

This poem is clear water

painted with sky,

rocks, and pine. It is as

deep as yesterday and

as wide as first sight.

This poem is a pool.

This poem is toes on

the edge gripping stones,

flirting with gravity,

wishing for wings.

This poem is vulnerable.

This poem is wisdom

that knows shifting earth

can be a leap into disaster.

It is a voice that brings

the rebel to the security

of solid ground.

This poem is trust.

This poem is a deep blue pool.

This poem is tempting fate.

This poem is wisdom inducing trust.

©Susie Clevenger 2014

This pond is on the way to Tofino. So pretty.

Link your poem and do check back for those who link later in the week. I am looking forward to where this approach takes us!

Statue of Truth
The Supreme Court of Canada

 

~Truth~               

~Honesty~

"The face of Truth is covered with a golden lid. 

O Nourisher (Sun), do thou remove it, 

so that I, who adore the True, may behold it". 

Verse 15 of the Isha Upanishad

 

This above all- to thine own self be true,

And it must follow, as the night the day, 

Thou canst not then be false to any man.

Shakespeare, Hamlet

What is truth? What is honesty? How did you learn about them?

In a time when some Governments lean away from truth, are we leaning more toward it?  Does it matter?  

(And on a lighter note, it is pure coincidence that this truth prompt opens on April Fools Day.  Make of that what you will!)

Adopt a point of view for your poem. Each of the sample poets below has a strong point of view.  

Enjoy.

💙💙💙

Tell all the truth but tell it slant –

By Emily Dickinson

Tell all the Truth but tell it slant –
Success in Circuit lies
Too bright for our infirm Delight
The Truth's superb surprise

As Lightning to the Children eased
With explanation kind
The Truth must dazzle gradually
Or every man be blind –

truth

By Gwendolyn Brooks

And if sun comes

How shall we greet him?

Shall we not dread him,

Shall we not fear him

After so lengthy a

Session with shade?

Though we have wept for him,

Though we have prayed

All through the night-years—

What if we wake one shimmering morning to

Hear the fierce hammering

Of his firm knuckles

Hard on the door?

Shall we not shudder?—

Shall we not flee

Into the shelter, the dear thick shelter

Of the familiar

Propitious haze?

Sweet is it, sweet is it

To sleep in the coolness

Of snug unawareness.

The dark hangs heavily

Over the eyes.

 

Legacies

By Nikki Giovanni

her grandmother called her from the playground   

       “yes, ma’am”

       “i want chu to learn how to make rolls” said the old   

woman proudly

but the little girl didn’t want

to learn how because she knew

even if she couldn’t say it that

that would mean when the old one died she would be less   

dependent on her spirit so

she said

       “i don’t want to know how to make no rolls”

with her lips poked out

and the old woman wiped her hands on

her apron saying “lord

       these children”

and neither of them ever

said what they meant

and i guess nobody ever does

 💙💙💙

Please link one poem that is your response to this prompt.  

After you link your poem, please visit others,

and

Don't forget to include this link in your post.