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Welcome to OpenLinkNight folks! This is your opportunity to link 1 poem of your choice as this is no prompt-day. For those who missed the Mr Linky deadline the past week or this Tuesday’s poetics about “Sensory Play”, this is also your opportunity to share your poem. I also want to remind you that our Haibun Monday is still open the whole week.

I would like to share a poster by Illustrator Wendy MacNaughton and writer Courtney E. Martin. They offer a heartening answer in a collaboration that stands as a mighty manifesto for our time and a testament to the only mechanism by which the creative spirit has ever pulled humanity out of every abyss of its own making.

 

“This is your assignment.

Feel all the things. Feel the hard things. The inexplicable things, the things that make you disavow humanity’s capacity for redemption. Feel all the maddening paradoxes. Feel overwhelmed, crazy. Feel uncertain. Feel angry. Feel afraid. Feel powerless. Feel frozen. And then FOCUS.

Pick up your pen. Pick up your paintbrush. Pick up your damn chin. Put your two calloused hands on the turntables, in the clay, on the strings. Get behind the camera. Look for that pinprick of light. Look for the truth (yes, it is a thing—it still exists.)

Focus on that light. Enlarge it. Reveal the fierce urgency of now. Reveal how shattered we are, how capable of being repaired. But don’t lament the break. Nothing new would be built if things were never broken. A wise man once said: there’s a crack in everything. That’s how the light gets in. Get after that light.

This is your assignment.”

Written shortly after Leonard Cohen’s death, the manifesto ends with a tender homage to his famous clarion call for democracy. Three versions of the poster are available online — red, white, and blue, black and white, and rainbow — with all proceeds donated to Hedgebrook, a rural writing residency for women.

To join us for Thursday’s OpenLinkNight, which happens every other week, here’s how to join:

  • Write a poem in your blog.
  • Enter a link directly to your 1 poem and your name by clicking Mr Linky below
  • There you will find links to other poets, and more will join during the next 48 hours
  • Read and comment on other poet’s work, we all go here to have our poems read
  • Please link back to dVerse from your site/blog.
  • Comment and participate in our discussion below, if you like.   We are a friendly bunch of poets.
  • Have fun.

See you at the poetry trail. ~Grace~