Poets United Midweek Motif ~ The Inanimate & The Non-Human

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Midweek Motif ~ The Inanimate & The Non-Human

"The place of the worst barbarism is that modern forest that makes use of us, this forest of chimneys and bayonets, machines and weapons, of strange inanimate beasts that feed on human flesh."---Amadeo Bordiga

"K2 is not some malevolent being, lurking there above the Baltoro, waiting to get us. It's just there. It's indifferent. It's an inanimate mountain made of rock, ice and snow. The "savageness" is what we project onto it, as if we blame the peak for our own misadventures on it."---Ed Viesturs

"We are all collateral damage for someone's beautiful ideology, all of us inanimate in the face of onslaught."---Benjamin Alire Saenz

"We cannot justify treating any sentient nonhuman as our property, as a resource, as a thing that we can use and kill for our purposes."---Gary L. Francione



For today's theme use the inanimate or the non-human as your subject. Build up an emotional connection with it.

You may give a fresh look to something very ordinary and uninspiring.

You may also write about something you care about, depend on or even afraid of.

Your poem may either be objective or from the perspective of your subject.

Let's check out the following poems:

Mirror

by Sylvia Plath

I am silver and exact. I have no preconceptions.
Whatever I see I swallow immediately
Just as it is, unmisted by love or dislike.
I am not cruel, only truthful,
The eye of a little god, four-cornered.
Most of the time I meditate on the opposite wall.
It is pink with speckles. I have looked at it so long
I think it is part of my heart. But if it flickers,
Faces and darkness separate us over and over.

Now I am a lake. A woman bends over me,
Searching my reaches for what she really is.
Then she turns to those liars, the candles or the moon.
I see her back, and reflect it faithfully.
She rewards me with tears and an agitation of hands.
I am important to her. She comes and goes.
Each morning it is her face that replaces the darkness.
In me she has drowned a young girl, and in me an old woman
Rises toward her day after day, like a terrible fish.

Fog

by Carl Sandburg

The fog comes
on little cat feet.

It sits looking
over harbor and city
on silent haunches
and then moves on.

A Bird Came Down The Walk

by Emily Dickinson

A Bird, came down the Walk -
he did not know I saw -
He bit an Angleworm in halves
And ate the fellow, raw,

And then, he drank a Dew
From a convenient Grass -
And then he hopped sidewise to the Wall
To let a Beetle pass -

He glanced with rapid eyes,
That hurried all abroad -
They looked like frightened Beads, I thought,
He stirred his Velvet Head -

Like one in danger, Cautious,
I offered him a Crumb,
And he unrolled his feathers,
And rowed him softer Home -

Than oars divide the ocean,
Too silver for a seam,
Or Butterflies, off Banks of Noon,
Leap, plashless as they swim.


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 Marriage)