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)

Poets United Midweek Motif ~ Colors

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"Mere color, unspoiled by meaning, and unallied with definite form, can speak to the soul in a thousand different ways."---Oscar Wilde

"Let me, O let me bathe my soul in colours; let me swallow the sunset and drink the rainbow."---Khalil Gibran

"I am the inferior of any man whose rights I trample under foot. Men are not superior by reason of the accidents of race or color. They are superior who have the best heart--the best brain."---Robert Ingersoll

                                                      Midweek Motif ~ Colors


Who wants a drab life or a colorless world? Imagine a monochromatic rainbow! We thank the sun all our life for the light, warmth and colors it brings to us. It's so sad that there are so many souls deprived of this gift of light and colors from birth.

Psychologists believe that in northern countries there is a large number of people who commit suicide simply because there is a prolonged absence of light and color due to the cold dark winter.

Sometimes our skin colors can become big issues even in today's world triggering discrimination.

Color may be synonymous to happiness. People paint their homes in happy colors to keep depression at bay.

Writers frequently use colors and its shades as symbols.

Nature displays Her colors magnificently throughout the seasons reminding us of birth, growth, decay and death.

What about the poets? Let's check out a few:

Domination of Black

by Wallace Stevens

At night, by the fire,

The colors of the bushes

And of the fallen leaves,

Repeating themselves,
Turned in the room,
Like the leaves themselves
Turning in the wind.

Yes: but the color of the heavy hemlocks
Came striding.

And I remember the cry of the peacocks. 

The colors of their tails
Were like the leaves themselves
Turning in the wind,
In the twilight wind.

They swept over the room,
Just as they flew from the boughs of the hemlocks
Down to the ground.

I heard them cry -- the peacocks.

Was it a cry against the twilight
Or against the leaves themselves
Turning in the wind,
Turning as the flames
Turned in the fire,
Turning as the tails of the peacocks
Turned in the loud fire,
Loud as the hemlocks
Full of the cry of the peacocks?
Or was it a cry against the hemlocks?

Out of the window,
I saw how the planets gathered
Like the leaves themselves
Turning in the wind.

I saw how the night came,
Came striding like the color of the heavy hemlocks
I felt afraid.

And I remembered the cry of the peacocks.

Letter in November

by Sylvia Plath

Love, the world
Suddenly turns, turns color.
The streetlight
Splits through the rat's tail
Pods of laburnum at nine in the morning.

It is the Arctic,

This little black
Circle, with its tawn silk grasses - babies hair.

There is a green in the air,
Soft, delectable.

It cushions me lovingly.

I am flushed and warm.

I think it may be enormous,
I am so stupidly happy,
My Wellingtons
Squelching and squelching through the beautiful red.

This is my property.

Two times a day
I pace it, sniffing
The barbarous holly with its viridian
Scallops, pure iron,

And the wall of the odd corpses.

I love them.

I love them like history.

The apples are golden
Imagine it----

My seventy trees
Holding their gold-ruddy balls
In a thick grey death-soup,
Their million
Gold leaves metal and breathless.

O love, o celibate.

Nobody but me
Walks the waist high wet.

Golds bleed and deepen, the mouths of Thermopylae.


Write a poem with "colors" today.

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 ~ Design)