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Paper Poetry

We are living in the digital world, covered in the autonomous aspects & tracked motions of life. Yet, somehow we are losing some critical elements. Keyboards, touchpads, & speech-to-text are there, but we believe that handwritten words on paper is still meaningful to some poets.

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Paper Poetry’s May 2025 prompt

The Sacrifices We Make

May they be in poetry and not in vain

7 min readMay 1, 2025

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An AI-generated image of the rear view of a dark-haired man wearing a long white robe and holding a thin staff walking over rocky terrain with sheep at his side.
Image by AstralEmber from Pixabay

Too long a sacrifice
Can make a stone of the heart.
O when may it suffice?
That is Heaven’s part

from Easter 1916 by William Butler Yeats

Greetings to our Paper Poetry friends,

The world is never silent; nor is it still. Much has happened these past few weeks that has demanded our attention, blurred the edges of joy and pain, gnawed incessantly at our fear, real or imagined. Out of that, one word, sacrifice, with all its positive and negative connotations, keeps popping up in the media, on the streets, and around the dinner table.

It happened again at a recent reading of W.B. Yeats’ poem, Easter 1916, where the themes of uncertainty and sacrifice were open for discussion. Yeats, in an effort to resolve his conflicting emotions, wrote the poem in the weeks immediately after the deadly Easter Monday uprising of Irish Republicans against the British establishment on April 24, 1916, when the world was already at war with itself.

Contrast that with this year’s Easter Monday (April 21) when early morning news from Vatican City informed the world of Pope Francis’ sudden passing.

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Paper Poetry
Paper Poetry

Published in Paper Poetry

We are living in the digital world, covered in the autonomous aspects & tracked motions of life. Yet, somehow we are losing some critical elements. Keyboards, touchpads, & speech-to-text are there, but we believe that handwritten words on paper is still meaningful to some poets.

Carolyn Hastings
Carolyn Hastings

Written by Carolyn Hastings

Well-practiced speech pathologist now practicing to be a children’s book writer — emphasis on practicing.

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