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Haiku For The Desert Sky
You were blue today
So I told you, “You look nice.”
And you were still blue. -
My home was not that yellow house
Where my mother took to alcohol
To quell the pains that I am only now
Given to understand.My home was the yard behind it
On moonless nights
With 6,000 stars overhead
Where I’d find peace.You can never go home again
Wrote Thomas Wolfe—how did he know
They’d build up my hometown
And need more streetlights?Now my home is a Brigadoon
That returns on that rare night
When power fails
Under clear skies. -
(via cleversimon)
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What Survives by Rainer Maria Rilke
Who says that all must vanish?
Who knows, perhaps the flight
of the bird you wound remains,
and perhaps flowers survive
caresses in us, in their ground.
It isn’t the gesture that lasts,
but it dresses you again in gold
armor —from breast to knees—
and the battle was so pure
an Angel wears it after you..Artemis: Thank you, promethean-eyes and journalofanobody. Beautiful. :) -
Jenny Kissed Me, Leigh Hunt
Jenny kissed me when we met,
Jumping from the chair she sat in;
Time, you thief, who love to get
Sweets into your list, put that in:
Say I’m weary, say I’m sad,
Say that health and wealth have missed me,
Say I’m growing old, but add,
Jenny kissed me.(via cleversimon)
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Yep. This.
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In Memory of Those Who Will Give All
In memory of those who will give all
Fighting future wars,
Still just children,
Now just children
Playing at games of war,
I shed these tears for your parents’ hearts broken. -
tj:
~Depression, too, is a kind of fire - Taylor Mali~
kalamazu replied to your quote: The so-called ‘psychotically depressed’ person who… There’s a Taylor Mali poem called “Depression, Too, Is a Kind of Fire.” Sounds a bit like this.
Wow, I hadn’t heard this before. The above embed is not a video, but audio of the author (I assume) reading this poem. (There’s an audiobook available.)
Thanks. Here’s the poem.
I’m an idiot because once
before we were married she asked me whether I knew
that we would not be having children
if we did get married, and I said yes.And because she knew I was lying,
she asked if I was really okay with that.
And because I’m an idiot I said yes again.And once during a fight, not married
more than two years, she said she felt like my first wife,
and I, like an idiot, assured her that she was.She worked out at the gym five times a week
and smoked as many packs of ultra lights,
and I’m an idiot because when I asked her why,
She said, Because I hate myself and I want to die.
And I laughed and said something I don’t recall,
something completely and utterly insufficient.From the roof of our apartment,
I saw 40 or 50 people jump from the towers
on a Tuesday morning—we used to be able to see them to the south,
just as, to the north, we can still see
(and by “we” I guess I mean now just me)
the Empire State Building,
which still steeps me in gratitude
because I’m an idiot—
out of the smoke with arms flailing.
And I swear I saw a perfect swan.And I was going to write a poem
about how fire is the only thing
that can make a person jump out a window.And maybe I’m an idiot for thinking I could have saved her—
call me her knight in shattered armor—
could have loved her more,
or told the truth about children.But depression, too, is a kind of fire.
And I know nothing of either.Reblogging for some future moment when I need to remember.
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Freedom. It isn’t once, to walk out
under the Milky Way, feeling the rivers
of light, the fields of dark—
freedom is daily, prose-bound, routine
remembering. Putting together, inch by inch
the starry worlds. From all the lost collections.-Adrienne Rich. Thanks for the infinite reminders and their measures. (via thesummerking)
RIP Adrienne Rich
(via sniffyjenkins)(via sniffyjenkins)
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☛ Adrienne Rich, feminist poet and author, dies at 82.
Excerpt from Diving Into the Wreck
And now: it is easy to forget
what I came for
among so many who have always
lived here swaying their crenellated fans
between the reefs
and besides
you breathe differently down here.I came to explore the wreck.
The words are purposes.
The words are maps.
I came to see the damage that was done
and the treasures that prevail.
I stroke the beam of my lamp
slowly along the flank
of something more permanent
than fish or weedthe thing I came for:
the wreck and not the story of the wreck
the thing itself and not the myth
the drowned face always staring
toward the sun
the evidence of damage
worn by salt and away into this threadbare beauty
the ribs of the disaster
curving their assertion
among the tentative haunters. -
The year you thought you were dying
was a really great year.You ate licorice on the beach in January,
swam rum sauced in the icy Pacific
wearing only blue rubber flippers
and your grandfather’s dog tags
and for the first time, it felt good to be cold,
it felt good to be so cold it hurt.You doted on pigeons and stray cats.
You ate honey peanuts in the park
and re-watched every movie that ever made you
cry, including Steve Martin’s The Jerk.
You tattooed your entire body in Pablo Neruda
translations and cherry blossoms.You blew all your money on comfortable shoes
and one of those mattresses made from NASA space foam.
You slept the sleep of assassins and kings—remorseless.You bought chocolate bars from all the kids who came
to your door and stock-piled them in your broom closet.
You left them in your will to THE SECRETARIES,
every last one of them.You volunteered at the local senior center playing bingo.
When you won you forced to whole room to take shots of
Welch’s grape juice and sing the national anthem.And you spent time with your favorite lover.
You let him get close.
Secret suicide note, nonsense alibi close.
shampoo scent dissection close.Close enough to memorize your tells,
hand you your ass at pillow poker,
make your defenses look like the silly decoupage
of paper angels and Victorian roses that they were.
Close enough that your laughter
punched him with mint gum puffs.
Close enough that his sighs drove circles
in the parking lots of your sighs,
close enough to measure your ribcage
in wrists, your palms in lips.So close, you didn’t even notice
your heart speed up, then stop,
when he kissed you so hard,
when the New Year’s ball dropped down.“The Year You Thought You Were Dying,” Mindy Nettifee (via highwayaisle)
Absolutely gorgeous.
(via undercovernun)(via undercovernun)
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I Ask for Silence by Pablo Neruda
Now leave me in peace
and learn to do without me.
I am going to close my eyes.
And I want five things only,
five chosen roots.
Once is an endless love.
The second is to see the autumn.
I cannot be if the leaves
don’t fly and fall to earth.
The third is the solemn winter,
the rain I loved, the caress
of fire on the wild coldness.
In fourth place, summer
plump as a watermelon.
The fifth thing is your eyes.
Matilde, my dear love,
I will not sleep without your eyes,
I do not want to be if you’re not looking at me:
I’d give up spring
for you to keep on looking at me.
That, friends, is all I want.
Nearly nothing, and almost everything.
Now you can go if you wish.
I have lived so much that some day
you will have to forget me forcibly,
rubbing me off the blackboard:
My heart went on forever.
But because I ask for silence,
don’t think that I’m going to die.
On the contrary:
It happens that I’m going to live.
It happens that I am, and I’m going on.
So it will only be inside me
that grains will grow,
first the sprouts thrusting through
the earth to see the light,
but mother Earth is dark:
and inside I am dark:
I am like a well on whose water
night leaves its stars
to go on alone across the fields.
It’s a question of having lived so much
that I want to live that much more.
I never felt my voice so clear,
never so rich in kisses.
Now, as always, it is early.
Light flies with its bees.
Let me alone with the day.
I ask leave to be born.
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one could do worse than be a swinger of birches.
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Broad and Yellow is the Evening Light by Anna Akhmatova
Broad and Yellow is the Evening Light by Anna Akhmatova
Broad and yellow is the evening light
Tender the April coolness
You are so many years late,
Nevertheless I am glad you came.
Sit here close to me
And look on joyfully:
Here is a blue composition book
With the poems of my childhood.
Forgive me that I ignored the sun
And that I lived in sorrow
Forgive, forgive that I
Mistook too many others for you.Anna Akhmatova (1889 – 1966)
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Earth, my dearest, oh believe me, you no longer need your springtimes to win me over … unspeakably, I have belonged to you, from the flush.
Rainer Maria Rilke. (via espacevide)
(via thesensualstarfish)
