Tag: poetry

tallsaint:

“The white light splutters and pours. Carnations; chrysanthemums. Ivy in dark gardens. Wherever I go, I see you, turning the corner, you, you, you. I hasten, I follow. This, I fancy, must be the sea. Grey is the landscape; dim as ashes; the water murmurs and moves. If I fall on my knees, if I go through the ritual, the ancient antics, it’s you I adore; if I open my arms, it’s you I embrace, you I draw to me—”

— Virginia Woolf, from Complete Works; “An Unwritten Novel,” (via wearyvoices)

metaphorformetaphor:

“I find me, leave me, go towards me, come from me, nothing ever but me, a particle of me, retrieved, lost, gone astray, I’m all these words, all these strangers, this dust of words, with no ground for their settling, no sky for their dispersing, coming together to say, fleeing one another to say, that I am they, all of them, those that merge, those that part, those that never meet, and nothing else, yes, something else, that I’m something quite different, a quite different thing, a wordless thing in an empty place, a hard shut dry cold black place, where nothing stirs, nothing speaks, and that I listen, and that I seek, like a caged beast born of caged beasts born of caged beasts born of caged beasts…”

— Samuel Beckett, from The Unnamable

(Grove, 1978;
first published 1953)

serpenstiarae:

“The swans were asleep,
dead matches floated in the dirty water,
and the gardens filled with whispered laughter.”

— Conrad Aiken, from Selected Poems; “Unofficial Report Made by Divers Trysting Places” 

violentwavesofemotion:

“I adore you, but I hate you too. You’re a prison smothered in flowers. I can’t stand this enchantment anymore, I can’t stand being bewitched like this–when I look at you, my gaze turns to nothing but a mirror of light, I’ll stare at you hypnotized for ages, and when I stop seeing you I’ll feel you, and when I stop feeling you I’ll die.”

Margarita Karapanou, tr. by Karen Emmerich, from “The Sleepwalker,” (x)

bebemoon:

“My heart cracked like a doll-dish, / my heart seized like a bee sting,…”

— Anne Sexton, from The Complete Poems: “Friends,”
(via violentwavesofemotion)

endless-unfolding:

Morning of buttered toast;
of coffee, sweetened, with milk.

Out of the window,
snow-spruces step from their cobwebs.
Flurry of chickadees, feeding then gone.
A single cardinal stipples an empty branch –
one maple leaf lifted back.

I turn my blessings like photographs into the light;
over my shoulder the god of Not-Yet looks on:

Not-yet-dead, not-yet-lost, not-yet-taken.
Not-yet-shattered, not-yet-sectioned,
not-yet-strewn.

Ample litany, sparing nothing I hate or love,
not-yet-silenced, not-yet-fractured, not-yet-

Not-yet-not.

I move my ear a little closer to that humming figure,
I ask him only to stay.

—Jane Hirshfield, “Not Yet,” in The Lives of the Heart (HarperCollins, 1997)

punlovsin:

“(…) violence has changed me.
My body has grown cold like the stripped fields;
now there is only my mind, cautious and wary.”

— Louise Glück, from October in “Poems 1962-2012″

(via adrasteiax)