hopeful

Here are some hopeful lines:     <a href=”https://dailypost.wordpress.com/prompts/hopeful/”>Hopeful</a&gt;

Urban Renewal

“Urban Renewal”  by Cardiff artist  Jo Whitby Here’s a poem by contemporary American poet Yusef Konumyakaa: Urban Renewal   The sun slides down behind brick dust, today’s angle of life. Everything   melts, even when backbones are I-beams braced for impact.   Sequential sledgehammers fall, stone shaped into dry air   white soundsystem of loose

the bursting shell, the gateway wrenched asunder

Peter Bruegel the Elder,  “Dulle Griet”  1562 Here are the last seven stanzas of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s poem “The Arsenal at Springfield” written in 1843: : The tumult of each sacked and burning village; The shout that every prayer for mercy drowns; The soldiers’ revels in the midst of pillage; The wail of famine in beleaguered

How to Stay Awake

I was looking for something that contained the word “ovation” and came across this quote. The quote from the poet Marilyn Nelson, describing the poetry of John Drury: “Fiercely intelligent, carefully honed, Drury’s poems trust in the myth of the way things are, singing of memory and loss to our sad world of ovation and

The day lifts its face

  Here’s a poem by Luci Shaw: On Retreat New Camaldoli Hermitage, Big Sur This early morning, in the chill before light, I lie open, face upward on the little bed, a supplicant, body reflecting soul,ready for something I cannot see, but crave.   I’m waiting, like any fern in a garden, to be rained

Our calm hearts strike only the hour

Woman inside Bird    by Yuko Hosaka   Here is a wonderful poem by Jane Kenyon: Notes from the Other Side   By Jane Kenyon, 1947 – 1995   I divested myself of despair and fear when I came here.   Now there is no more catching one’s own eye in the mirror,   there are

To cast toward shadows, where the sunlight fails

Here’s a poem  by A. E. Stallings: Fishing   By A. E. Stallings   The two of them stood in the middle water, The current slipping away, quick and cold, The sun slow at his zenith, sweating gold, Once, in some sullen summer of father and daughter. Maybe he regretted he had brought her— She’d

Unable to Rejoice

First Snow      art by Jennifer Lommers   This poem by Edward Thomas is not maddening, except that it points to the reality of poor people without shelter on this very cold day:   The Owl  Downhill I came, hungry, and yet not starved; Cold, yet had heat within me that was proof Against the North

Hope travels through, nor quits us when we die

Children running in the park     Painting by Andrew Macaria Here’s a poem by Alexander Pope, from his “Essay on Man” ( though I’ve never heard the word “pelf” before and wonder if he made it up!) ‘Human Folly’ – the poem Whate’er the passions, knowledge, fame, or pelf, Not one will change is neighbour with

But is it Art?

London Cityscape    by Atkinson Grimshaw    1890’s I found a poem with “Conundrum” in the Title!  It was written by the Victorian poet Rudyard Kipling.  I was amazed at the subject matter, because writers argue about this in the present time: The Conundrum of the Workshops Rudyard Kipling, 1865 – 1936   When the flush of