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Poems About Power
Feel Free to Quote!
CHOOSE
THE single clenched fist lifted and ready,Or the open asking hand held out and waiting.Choose:For we meet by one or the other.
-- Carl Sandburg
The Balloon Of The MindHands, do what you're bid:Bring the balloon of the mindThat bellies and drags in the windInto its narrow shed.
William Butler Yeats
An Interruptionby Robert Foote
A boy had stopped his carTo save a turtle in the road;I was not farBehind, and slowed,And stopped to watch as he beganTo shoo it off into the undergrowth—
This wild reminder of an ancient past,Lumbering to some Late Triassic bog,Till it was just a rustle in the grass,Till it was gone.
I hope I told him with a lookAs I passed by,How I was glad he'd stopped me there,And what I felt for bothOf them, something I tookTo be a kind of love,And of a troubled thoughtI had, for man,Of how we oughtTo let life go on whereAnd when it can.
In your Writer’s Notebook, summarize this poem using four vocab words from our
current vocab unit.
“Keeping Quiet” by Robert Bly
A friend of mine says that every warIs some violence in childhood coming closer.Those whoppings in the shed weren’t a joke.On the whole, it didn’t turn out well.
This has been going on for thousandsOf years! It doesn’t change. SomethingHappened to me, and I can’t tellAnyone, so it will happen to you.
“Roar” by Katy PerryYou held me down, but I got up (HEY!)
Already brushing off the dustYou hear my voice, you hear that soundLike thunder gonna shake the groundYou held me down, but I got up (HEY!)Get ready ’cause I’ve had enoughI see it all, I see it now
I got the eye of the tiger, a fighter, dancing through the fire‘Cause I am a champion and you’re gonna hear me roarLouder, louder than a lion‘Cause I am a champion and you’re gonna hear me roar
1. How do people generally acquire and maintain power?
2. What happens when there is a change in power?
3. What makes a person or group powerful at any given place or time?
4. How can power be used to accomplish good?
5. What constitutes an abuse of power and how do people respond to such abuses?
COMPARE AND CONTRAST: SIMILARITIES TO OUR READING?
Boarding Houseby Ted Kooser
The blind man draws his curtains for the night and goes to bed, leaving a burning light
above the bathroom mirror. Through the wall, he hears the deaf man walking down the hall
in his squeaky shoes to see if there’s a light Under the blind man’s door, and all is right
We Wear the Maskby Paul Lawrence Dunbar
WE wear the mask that grins and lies, It hides our cheeks and shades our eyes,— This debt we pay to human guile; With torn and bleeding hearts we smile, And mouth with myriad subtleties. Why should the world be over-wise, In counting all our tears and sighs? Nay, let them only see us, while We wear the mask. We smile, but, O great Christ, our cries To thee from tortured souls arise. We sing, but oh the clay is vile Beneath our feet, and long the mile; But let the world dream otherwise, We wear the mask!
1. The courage that my mother hadWent with her, and is with her still:Rock from New England quarried;
Now granite in a granite hill.
5. The golden brooch my mother woreShe left behind for me to wear;I have no thing I treasure more:
Yet, it is something I could spare.
9. Oh, if instead she'd left to meThe thing she took into the grave!-That courage like a rock, which sheHas no more need of, and I have.
“The Courage that My Mother Had”by Edna St. Vincent Millay
Fill out the “ticket in” on
your desk
Evening on the Lawnby Gary Soto
I sat on the lawn watching the half-hearted moon rise,The gnats orbiting the peach pit that I spat outWhen the sweetness was gone. I was twenty,Wet behind the ears from my car wash job,And suddenly rising to my feet when I saw in early eveningA cloud roll over a section of stars.It was boiling, a cloudChurning in one place and washing those three or four stars.Excited, I lay back down,My stomach a valley, my arms twined with new rope,My hair a youthful black. I called my mother and stepfather,And said something amazing was happening up there.
. . . Evening on the Lawn ctnd.They shaded their eyes from the porch light.They looked and looked before my mom turnedThe garden hose onto a rosebush and my stepfather scolded the catTo get the hell off the car. The old man grumbledAbout missing something on TV,The old lady made a faceWhen mud splashed her slippers. How you bother,She said for the last time, the screen door closing like a sigh.I turned off the porch light, undid my shoes.The cloud boiled over those stars until it was burned by their icy fire.The night was now clear. The wind brought me a scentOf a place where I would go alone,Then find others, all barefoot.In time, each of us would boil cloudsAnd strike our childhood housesWith lightning.
