vulturechow:

Love is not the last room: there are others
after it, the whole length of the corridor
that has no end.

Yehuda Amichai

vulturechow:

You loved me. And your lies had their own probity.
There was a truth in every falsehood.
Your love went far beyond any possible
boundary      as no one else’s could.
Your love seemed to last even longer
than time itself. Now you wave your hand—
and suddenly your    love for me is over!
That is the truth in five words.

— Marina Tsvetaeva,“You loved me,” Selected Poems (Penguin Classics, 1994)

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heteroglossia:

Sappho 55, Trans. Anne Carson

Don’t listen to 18 year old boys who
read Nietzsche and tell you life is pointless.
I don’t know about god, and I know we are
profligates all; thieves, checkout workers
crooked lawyers— with our wood chip wallpaper,
our TV dinners, our heartburn— but by god, if we didn’t see
horses, bows and hunters in the randomness
of the stars. Know that contempt is a kind
of cowardice. How easy it is to look upon
fellow man as a futile bunch of mortal cells
a fretwork of dark blood, bound for
some modern cancer. I’m bored by your boredom.
Despite it all; (the burning cars on the news,
the evening war, the prison complexes) I still maintain
what is more difficult and far nobler is to love defiantly
even though we live a hairsbreadth from oblivion
from cheap funeral parlour cremation. To pledge
yourself to the world’s newborn o of surprise—
a prolonged o of angel fish, ocean and aurora
the blue song of all that we loved but could not name.

Instructions for a prophet, by paperswallow (via noorthwest)

we disappear
eagles tigers
nothing in the gold
nothing in the emeralds
nothing in the feathers
nothing in the word

//

it is so hard
to live like this!
no happiness on the earth
for me

//

we live on earth
lent
here we are
men
over there ones without bodies
in your house
here home between
a little while only

//

on the edge of war near the bonfire
we taste knowledge

//

because I cry
because I am desperate
I am left alone
there is no compassion on earth
how can I live among men
even at your side
god
I am bitter

//

where are we going Oh where are we going
are we dead are we still alive
is this where time ends is there time somewhere else
people are only here on earth
with pungent flowers and with songs
and out of the world
surely
they make truths!

//

only with our flowers can we find pleasure
only with our songs does our sadness dissolve

Stephen Berg, Nothing in the Word: Versions of Aztec Poetry (via heteroglossia)

آسمان آبی تر
آب آبی تر
من درایوانم رعنا سر حوض
رخت می شوید رعنا
برگ ها می ریزد
مادرم صبحی می گفت :‌ موسم دلگیری است
من به او گفتم : زندگانی سیبی است ‚ گاز باید زد با پوست
زن همسایه در پنجره اش تور می بافد می خواند
من ودا می خوانم گاهی نیز
طرح می ریزم سنگی ‚ مرغی ‚ ابری
آفتابی یکدست
سارها آمده اند
تازه لادن ها پیدا شده اند
من اناری را می کنم دانه به دل می گویم
خوب بود این مردم دانه های دلشان پیدا بود
می پرد در چشمم آب انار : اشک می ریزم
مادرم می خندد
رعنا هم .

Sohrab Sepehri - Saade Rang

A bluer sky
A bluer water
I’m on the balcony, Ra’na’s by the pool
Washing her clothes
The leaves are falling
My mother one morning said: It’s a dismal season
I said to her: Life is an apple, we should bite into its skin
The neighbour’s wife at her window knits and sings
"I sing a goodbye song
And knit a pattern of a rock, a bird, a cloud”
A smooth sunbeam
The starlings have come
New wildflowers have been found
I peel a pomegranate and say to myself
It would be good if the seeds of people’s hearts could be seen
Pomegranate juice jumps in my eye: I shed tears
My mother smiles
Ra’na, too.

(via ribqueen)

Every year
everything
I have ever learned

in my lifetime
leads back to this: the fires
and the black river of loss
whose other side

is salvation,
whose meaning
none of us will ever know.
To live in this world

you must be able
to do three things:
to love what is mortal;
to hold it

against your bones knowing
your own life depends on it;
and, when the time comes to let it
go,
to let it go.

In Blackwater Woods, Mary Oliver (via christiandinoor)

heteroglossia:

"It occurred to me / that one night I’d / cross the damp cold lawn & down the bluff / into the terrible water & walk forever / under it out toward the island." — John Berryman

In the quiet that precedes
small remnants of sound
headlights mark
shadows in fog-stream:
a few cars on the highway.

The driver turns, unthinking onto
back road, soon she finds that infinite-
simal break
where pavement meets forest,
half littered path & heavy undergrowth
in throes of spring’s first hours,
minutes, walks

toward the spot where sun
might be,
rising
if it were, sheds
her coat her bag her sweater:
not needed. She will walk this path,

& then walk longer. Knowing
since youth, that one night she too
would last cross

the damp-oak grounds
clothless, soundless
toward crack of light, 
that great edge
be it water or sky, where there is
no I, nor word for I.

— Jacqueline Winter Thomas, “Coming Home”

Say surrender. Say alabaster. Switchblade.
            Honeysuckle. Goldenrod. Say autumn.
Say autumn despite the green
            in your eyes. Beauty despite
daylight. Say you’d kill for it. Unbreakable dawn
            mounting in your throat.
My thrashing beneath you
            like a sparrow stunned
with falling.

Ocean Vuong, from “On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous,” Poetry (December 2014)

spicychimney:

I. Hades

Listen, I’m a nice guy
for the god of the underworld.
I feel like 
we can probably 
relate. Everybody dies, and also,
listen, my dog’s name means spot. 
Gods, they’re just like the rest of you,
and the daughters of gods 
are as close to human
as immortals get.

Zeus, he was always 
turning into a swan or a bull
and chasing girls when they were still
young as the wheat field
before harvest, young as the amphora
before it was painted, young
as the pomegranate seed—and somehow,
despite the personal tragedies,
as I diligently reaped the fallout,
the trees never died all at once.

Hera raged, but the grass grew.

Beneath the ground, I saw the spindles
of many roots grasping at air,
rode the boat to work each morning, and,
surrounded by the dead—who had
nothing new to say and never shed a tear—
I fell in love with her
when I saw her weeping.

II. Demeter

When you plant a flower you must take care of the flower and when it blooms,
love its beauty. The same must be said for the grapevine and its grapes, and so on.

It was because of her that I invented the fruit, little red beads like laughter
and like blood. When you split the skin, it stains the hands. A beautiful fruit

and difficult, too, the way a daughter is difficult. There is so much inside her
for the hungry to eat. She had to learn to plant the seeds, not eat them.

“Hera,” I said, and she took my hand, commiserating. If she could, she said,
she would blight the lands, although her jealousy was a mirror and mine

was a cracked vase.

III. Persephone

I never knew that anything could die until that morning.
I had only ever seen baby birds and calves and olive trees

and loved each one. They were children and so was I.
When I followed the goat I thought we would both

drink from the stream and return home. I thought
we both left for the same reasons. I thought this.

But I saw the fox kill the goat. I saw a farmer kill the fox.
I stayed and saw the farmer bury his wife, who was killed

by no one. One by one, all of them went somewhere
I thought I could not follow, but I followed;

I was wrong.  

Yet no matter how deeply I go down into myself
my God is dark, and like a webbing made
of a hundred roots, that drink in silence.

Rainer Maria Rilke, from The Book of Hours (via queerprophets)

You, who are sculpting a statue of Ilyich
Twenty metres high, at the Palace of the Trades Unions
Do not forget that in his boot
There was the hole, attested by many, a sign of poverty.
I hear to be sure, he faces
The West, where many live, who in the hole in the boot
Will recognise Ilyich as
One of their own.

Bertolt Brecht |  The Hole in Ilyich’s Boots (1935)

You ask me about that country whose details now escape me,
I don’t remember its geography, nothing of its history.
And should I visit it in memory,
It would be as I would a past lover,
After years, for a night, no longer restless with passion,
With no fear of regret.
I have reached that age when one visits the heart merely as a courtesy.

Pakistani poet Faiz Ahmed Faiz (via iranianamrikai)

divine-despair:

Before you came,
things were as they should be:
the sky was the dead-end of sight,
the road was just a road, wine merely wine.

Now everything is like my heart,
a color at the edge of blood:
the grey of your absence, the color of poison, of thorns,
the gold when we meet, the season ablaze,
the yellow of autumn, the red of flowers, of flames,
and the black when you cover the earth
with the coal of dead fires.

And the sky, the road, the glass of wine?
The sky is a shirt wet with tears,
the road a vein about to break,
and the glass of wine a mirror in which
the sky, the road, the world keep changing.

Don’t leave now that you’re here—
Stay. So the world may become like itself again:
so the sky may be the sky,
the road a road,
and the glass of wine not a mirror, just a glass of wine.

Before You Came by Faiz Ahmed Faiz

awritersruminations:

And still I dare to love
the sound of the light in the hours of deadness
the color of time on a ruined wall.

In my eyes I’ve lost everything.
Asking is so far away. And so close, this knowledge of want.

—Alejandra Pizarnik, “A Beggar Voice" (translated by Yvette Siegert)

mmg62ui35gyu24:

As one turns to one in a dream
smiling like a bell that has just
stopped tolling, holds out a book,
and speaks: “All the vulgarity 

of time, from the Stone Age 
to our present, with its noodle parlors
and token resistance, is as a life
to the life that is given you. Wear it,”

so must one descend from checkered heights
that are our friends, needlessly
rehearsing what we will say
as a common light bathes us,

a common fiction reverberates as we pass
to the celebration. Originally
we weren’t going to leave home. But made bold
somehow by the rain we put our best foot forward.

Now it’s years after that. It
isn’t possible to be young anymore.
Yet the tree treats me like a brute friend;
my own shoes have scarred the walk I’ve taken.

—John Ashbery, ‘Token Resistance’ from And The Stars Were Shining

forte-fievre:

To believe in God is to love

What none can see. Let a lover go,

Let him walk out with the good

Spoons or die

Without a signature, and so much

Remains for scrubbing, for a polish

Cleaner than devotion. Tonight,

God is one spot, and you,

You must be one blind nun. You

Wipe, you rub, but love won’t move.

Jericho Brown, Another Elegy

blue1887:

I remember your eyes: fifty attack dogs on a single leash.

Jeffrey McDaniel, from Letter To The Woman Who Stopped Writing Me Back

urban-flesh:

Bertolt Brecht, Morning Address to a Tree Named Green

radicalvulnerability:

A qui me louer? Quelle bête faut-il adorer? Quelle sainte image attaque-t-on? Quels cœurs briserai-je? Quel mensonge dois-je tenir? — Dans quel sang marcher?

//

To whom shall I hire myself out? What beast should I adore? What holy image is attacked? What hearts shall I break? What lies should I uphold? In what blood tread?

— Arthur Rimbaud, Mauvais sang / Bad Blood (trans. L Varèse)