MAW ONLINE RESOURCES
POETRY
For text in this class, you should use something that is versatile like the sonnets or poetry. Below are examples of poems we typically use in class. Choose one that speaks to you (here or elsewhere), get it off book & use it for moments that call for text to see the difference in your body & intuitive thoughts!
Love After Love
by Derek Walcott
The time will come when, with elation,
you will greet yourself arriving
at your own door,
in your own mirror,
and each will smile at the other's welcome,
And say, sit here.
Eat.
You will love again the stranger who was yourself. Give wine. Give bread.
Give back your heart to itself,
to the stranger who has loved you
all your life,
whom you ignored for another,
who knows you by heart.
Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,
the photographs, the desperate notes, peel your own image from the mirror.
Sit.
Feast on your life.
Caged Bird
by Maya Angelou
A free bird leaps
on the back of the wind
and floats downstream
till the current ends
and dips his wing
in the orange sun rays
and dares to claim the sky.
But a bird that stalks
down his narrow cage
can seldom see through
his bars of rage
his wings are clipped and
his feet are tied
so he opens his throat to sing.
The caged bird sings
with a fearful trill
of things unknown
but longed for still
and his tune is heard
on the distant hill
for the caged bird
sings of freedom.
The free bird thinks of another breeze
and the trade winds soft through the sighing trees
and the fat worms waiting on a dawn bright lawn
and he names the sky his own
But a caged bird stands on the grave of dreams
his shadow shouts on a nightmare scream
his wings are clipped and his feet are tied
so he opens his throat to sing.
The caged bird sings
with a fearful trill
of things unknown
but longed for still
and his tune is heard
on the distant hill
for the caged bird
sings of freedom.
Wild Geese
by Mary Oliver
You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
For a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese,
high in the clean blue air, are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese,
harsh and exciting – over and over
announcing your place
in the family of things.
Stream of Life
By Rabindranath
Tagore
The same stream of life that runs through my veins runs through the world and dances in rhythmic measure.
It is the same life that shoots in joy through the dust of the earth into numberless blades of grass, and breaks into tumultuous waves of leaves and flowers.
It is the same life that is rocked in the ocean cradle of birth and death, in ebb and in flow.
My limbs are made glorious by the touch of this world of life; and my pride is from the life throb of ages dancing in my blood this moment.
Always We Hope
By Lao Tzu
Always we hope someone else has the answer.
Some other place will be better,
some other time it will all turn out.
This is it.
no one else has the answer.
no other place will be better, and it has already turned out.
At the center of your being you have the answer;
you know who you are and you know what you want.
There is no need to run outside for better seeing.
Nor to peer from a window.
Rather abide at the center of your being;
for the more you leave it, the less you learn.
Search your heart and see the way to do is to be.
The Gift
by Dawna Markova
I will not die an unlived life
I will not live in fear of falling or catching fire.
I choose to inhabit my days,
to allow my living to open me,
to make me less afraid,
more accessible,
to loosen my heart until it becomes a wing,
a torch, a promise.
I choose to risk my significance;
to live so that which came to me as seed
goes to the next as blossom
and that which came to me as blossom,
goes on as fruit.
Invictus
By William Ernest Henley
Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.
In the fell clutch of circumstance
I have not winced nor cried aloud.
Under the bludgeonings of chance
My head is bloody, but unbowed.
Beyond this place of wrath and tears
Looms but the Horror of the shade,
And yet the menace of the years
Finds and shall find me unafraid.
It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll,
I am the master of my fate,
I am the captain of my soul.
THE JOURNEY
by David Whyte
Above the mountains the geese turn into the light again
painting their black silhouettes on an open sky.
Sometimes everything has to be inscribed across the heavens
so you can find the one line already written inside you.
Sometimes it takes a great sky to find that
small, bright and indescribable wedge of freedom in your own heart.
Sometimes with the bones of the black sticks left when the fire has gone out
someone has written something new in the ashes of your life.
You are not leaving You are arriving
Harlem
by Langston Hughes
What happens to a dream deferred?
Does it dry up
like a raisin in the sun?
Or fester like a sore—
And then run?
Does it stink like rotten meat?
Or crust and sugar over—
like a syrupy sweet?
Maybe it just sags
like a heavy load.
Or does it explode?.
Lost
by David Wagner
Stand still.
The trees ahead and bushes beside you are not lost.
Wherever you are is called here,
and you must treat it as a powerful stranger,
must ask permission to know it and be known.
The forest breathes.
Listen.
It answers, I have made this place around you, if you leave it you may come back again, saying Here.
No two trees are the same to Raven.
No two branches are the same to Wren.
If what a tree or a bush does is lost on you,
you are surely lost.
Stand still.
The forest knows where you are.
You must let it find you.
Spotify Playlists:
Use these premade Playlists for any Bad Dancing you want to do! Press play randomly and let your intuition guide you!