September 4, 2007 - 3:22pm — vistajames
Poetry for Empowerment
This forum comes out of robinbird and sassafras' forums on "creativity" and "inspiration." I thought it could be a place where through the medium of poetry we could discuss both how to help the literacy in our communities, consider youth empowerment through poetry, as well as just share and enjoy poems. I've included the poems in the "inspiration" forum just to get this started. Thanks guys!
"Prairie Spring – Willa Cather"
Evening and the flat land,
Rich and sombre and always silent;
The miles of fresh-plowed soil,
Heavy and black, full of strength and harshness;
The growing wheat, the growing weeds,
The toiling horses, the tired men;
The long empty roads,
Sullen fires of sunset, fading,
The eternal, unresponsive sky.
Against all this, Youth,
Flaming like the wild roses,
Singing like the larks over the plowed fields,
Flashing like a star our of the twilight;
Youth with its insupportable sweetness,
Its fierce necessity,
Its sharp desire,
Singing and singing,
Out of the lips of silence,
Out of the earthy dusk.
"Stacy Blevins"
It may not stop the hunger,
Or bring mankind world peace,
It may not make the poor men rich,
Or cause the wars to cease.
It may not calm the roaring seas,
Or stop the poverty,
But the power of one voice can change the world,
And that's all it needs to be!
"Mending Wall" - Robert Frost
Something there is that doesn't love a wall,
That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it,
And spills the upper boulders in the sun,
And makes gaps even two can pass abreast.
The work of hunters is another thing:
I have come after them and made repair
Where they have left not one stone on a stone,
But they would have the rabbit out of hiding,
To please the yelping dogs. The gaps I mean,
No one has seen them made or heard them made,
But at spring mending-time we find them there.
I let my neighbor know beyond the hill;
And on a day we meet to walk the line
And set the wall between us once again.
We keep the wall between us as we go.
To each the boulders that have fallen to each.
And some are loaves and some so nearly balls
We have to use a spell to make them balance:
'Stay where you are until our backs are turned!'
We wear our fingers rough with handling them.
Oh, just another kind of out-door game,
One on a side. It comes to little more:
There where it is we do not need the wall:
He is all pine and I am apple orchard.
My apple trees will never get across
And eat the cones under his pines, I tell him.
He only says, 'Good fences make good neighbors'.
Spring is the mischief in me, and I wonder
If I could put a notion in his head:
'Why do they make good neighbors? Isn't it
Where there are cows?
But here there are no cows.
Before I built a wall I'd ask to know
What I was walling in or walling out,
And to whom I was like to give offence.
Something there is that doesn't love a wall,
That wants it down.' I could say 'Elves' to him,
But it's not elves exactly, and I'd rather
He said it for himself. I see him there
Bringing a stone grasped firmly by the top
In each hand, like an old-stone savage armed.
He moves in darkness as it seems to me~
Not of woods only and the shade of trees.
He will not go behind his father's saying,
And he likes having thought of it so well
He says again, "Good fences make good neighbors."
To me, each poem is remarkably concise in three different topics that we could discuss from here. Cather's poem is shows us the virility of youth and how they can have the strength to move a tired group (aka, the "adults"), while the second explains in a lovely way how one voice can change the world, even if it is a voice not necessarily heard. The third is long, I know, but within seems to be a very interesting dialogue on just how people get along with each other in the world. Q: How do these three correlate? How can each philosophy be used to rethink our lives and actions?