poetry

"…remember that day you lost two years ago
at the rockpool where you sat and played the jeweler
with all those stones you’d stolen from the shore?
Most of them went dark and nothing more,
but sometimes one would blink the secret color
it had locked up somewhere in its stony sleep.
This is how you knew the ones to keep."

—Don Paterson,Why do you say up late? (via purveyor-of-fine-whines)

mother-ground: Detail of My Sort of Light   →

Now I know that everything is a body,
so even the snow and the sand and
the blood rivered down in the snow,
and snowed on again so it’s buried
is a body. All things are bodies in photos—
detail of the left side of a breast and the arm’s
pit—detail of the sled slumbered under
by the storm’s…

"The way a crow
Shook down on me
The dust of snow
From a hemlock tree

Has given my heart
A change of mood
And saved some part
Of a day I had rued."

—Robert Frost, “Snowfall” (via proustitute)

"I have no need for words.
The sleet on the windows,
the slow breathing of you sleeping,
the clock’s hum—
our home’s soft conversation.
No moon, but the clouds hold all that snow,
night softened to gray; no words can lighten
a sky like that, ease the push and pull that
holds us tight. What is it we won’t say?

Under the streetlight a rabbit shivers along
fence posts, shadows long as wet pines,
chicken wire clotted with drifts.
The heaviness of it—the spinning trees,
the sharp tongue of wind,
the fall into the smell of leaves,
into the cold, into you. Wordless."

—Patricia Kennedy Bostian, from “Sunday Afternoon” (via awritersruminations)

"

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 your self.
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.

—Derek Walcott (via whimsicalele)

(via dreaminginthedeepsouth)

"all things are subject to interpretation; whichever interpretation prevails at a given time is a function of power and not truth."

—friedrich nietzsche (via rhea137)

(Source: letteropener, via thesecretofexistence)

"Last night, in the silence which pervaded the darkness, I stood alone and heard the voice of the singer of the eternal melodies. When I went to sleep, I closed my eyes with this last thought in my mind, that even when I remain unconscious in slumber the dance of life will still go on in the hushed arena of my sleeping body, keeping step with the stars. The heart will throb, the blood will leap in the veins, and the millions of living atoms of my body will vibrate in tune with the note of the harp-string that thrills at the touch of the master."

—Rabindranath Tagore (via silencesounds)

(Source: technologeet, via silencesounds)

"I forgive your hand, right now rising, falling, and leaving trace
unlike what it praises; I forgive your shadow for never becoming
a stain to mark this road, this bed, but mostly this sea."

—Valzhyna Mort, from “Island” (via proustitute)

POETRYEATER: from Bronwen Wallace, "Common Magic"   →

poetryeater:

The old man
across from you on the bus holds
a young child on his knee; he is singing
to her and his voice is a small boy
turning somersaults in the green
country of his blood.
It’s only when the driver calls his stop
that he emerges into this puzzle
of brick and tiny hedges. Only then
…