For Paul Brookes’ challenge, the prompt is They say that about the meek by Marcel Herms.
Ask no questions, hear no lies.
No rest for the wicked, they say,
the devil makes work for idle hands
and takes the hindmost,
but God helps those who help themselves.
Let me have men about me that are fat.
And we, the meek and mild,
the children and their mothers,
the poor and the dispossessed,
the widow who handed over her mite,
we who wait on the side lines for
those promised crumbs from the rich man’s table?
You have a lean and hungry look.
Blessed are those, they reply,
who turn the other cheek,
so as not to see the blow fall
at the other side of the street.
The earth teems with the meek
with no voice, the four-footed,
the winged; all creep into the abyss
made for them by the fat and sleek.
Excellent Jane but so depressingly true.💜
Shame, isn’t it?
Yes indeed 💜
🙂
I spent most of my early life being meek, these days it’s better to be a little bit wicked…
It’s now or never 🙂
Reblogged this on The Wombwell Rainbow.
Thanks Paul 🙂
I hear my mother now -God helps those who help themselves.
It’s one of those neat quasi bible quotes that means exactly what you want it to.
I saw a picture from Serbia this morning where priests are standing around the dead body of their deceased ‘colleague,’ all without masks. In the last couple weeks quite a few church officials have died of covid, including bishops and archbishops, the Metropolitan of Montenegro, as well as the Patriarch of the Serbian Orthodox Church himself. And the pattern is always the same – each gets infected at the mass or wake of the deceased one, and I’m hearing my mother time and time again – God helps those who help themselves.
If you’ve got God on your side, I suppose you think you can ignore the science.
Just like they believe frankincense is a good enough protection from the virus.
Or bleach.
Haha.
Sad, depressing, true–and all the comments above. 😔
The world is what it is. It’s hard to do sunny smiles, I find.
The last stanza sums it up. You have been given a bleak set of images to work with for the most part. There is more going on than the dark parts, but it’s hard to see sometimes. (K)
The Herms paintings are grisly. It’s a style that doesn’t lend itself to placid themes, too erratic and jagged and grotesque.
It’s very similar in style to Basquiat, but he had a sense of humor and a much larger repertoire of ideas.
Basquiat enjoyed himself a lot of the time I’d say. His stuff is vibrant, but Herms’ paintings are all grotesque and unsettling.
Not someone I would have chosen for an ekphrastic challenge.
I’ve enjoyed some of them though I do find that they all express the same emotion. One or two would have been enough for me.