TUESDAY POEM | Mushrooms by Sylvia Plath

                                   MUSHROOMS

                                   Overnight, very
                                   Whitely, discreetly,
                                   Very quietly

                                   Our toes, our noses
                                   Take hold on the loam,
                                   Acquire the air.

                                   Nobody sees us,
                                   Stops us, betrays us;
                                   The small grains make room.

                                   Soft fists insist on
                                   Heaving the needles,
                                   The leafy bedding,

                                   Even the paving.
                                   Our hammers, our rams,
                                   Earless and eyeless,

                                   Perfectly voiceless,
                                   Widen the crannies,
                                   Shoulder through holes. We

                                   Diet on water,
                                   On crumbs of shadow,
                                   Bland-mannered, asking

                                   Little or nothing.
                                   So many of us!
                                   So many of us!

                                   We are shelves, we are
                                   Tables, we are meek,
                                   We are edible,

                                   Nudgers and shovers
                                   In spite of ourselves.
                                   Our kind multiplies:

                                   We shall by morning
                                   Inherit the earth.
                                   Our foot's in the door.


                                   Sylvia Plath 
                                                       - from the anthology Staying Alive - real poems for unreal times. Edited by Neil Astley. 

This week's editor on the Tuesday Poem hub is Jen Compton 

with the powerful and poignant poem Thoughts of the Father

by Australian poet Philip Salom

". . .  In the mid 90s I wrote a sequence of poems prompted by the Commentaries of the I Ching. In this case (Thoughts of the Father), I wrote in response to Ku, the 18th hexagram. Above the poem, as epigraph, I have quoted those selections from the commentary that struck me most closely - " 

To read more, please click on the quill. 

. . . and a bit of fun. . . 

Tissue paper & cotton tips* Mushroom 

(playing around with 'studio leftovers' after Friday evening's Creative Play group.)

(*ear buds?)

UPDATE  |  There's been a change. . . (and I'm going to leave Jen's earlier TP post up, too, as it's a must-read.)

Rethabile Masilo stepped up at short notice as this week's unscheduled editor on the TP hub. He has chosen Johannesburg-based poet Michelle McGrane's sensual and inviting poem (a potent counterpoise to the complex reality of sexual abuse)  If You Are Lucky. . . 

                                         "If you are lucky
                                         you will carry one night with you
                                         for the rest of your life,
                                         a night like no other.
                                         You won't see it coming. . . "