"Separation brought this kind of grief:
it made itself a mullah and me the village thief."

Basbibi

"Make a hole in Facebook and plant me one.
Tell your mother, “I’ve been bitten by a scorpion."

Eimal Dorani

Two Landays from Poetry Magazine – Rethink.

followthewestwind:

(via Autumn Afire)

“Where are the songs of Spring? Ay, where are they?
Think not of them, thou hast thy music too,—”

- John Keats, “To Autumn”

(via keepdreamingkate)

Jane Hirshfield, “An hour is not a house” →

An hour is not a house,
a life is not a house,
you do not go through them as if
they were doors to another.

Yet an hour can have shape and proportion,
four walls, a ceiling.
An hour can be dropped like a glass.

Some want quiet as others want bread.
Some want sleep.

My eyes went
to the window, as a cat or dog left alone does.

Amy King, “I’ve Opted for a Heart This Mid-November Morn” →

How to find ivory’s antecedent among these drifts of snow,
restore the clover to its buried frozen form?
And what about
the girl with loneliness, her lush medium dressed in birds?
Inside the dress embraces a range of mercurial gazes,
an advanced degree in gleaning eyes
from the wrist that turns the curves into contagious angles.
It is hard not to die, and yet here, the singer and sewer, one,
stitch a voice into the actual road. We ambulate each alone,
pressing stuffed figures to our chests, wailing silence
for a warmer bosom feathered, opposite our own.

“If you are coming down through the narrows of the river Kiang,
Please let me know beforehand,
And I will come out to meet you
As far as Cho-fu-Sa.”

- Li Po

(via shineslikethesun)

"We exclaimed at crucial moments of our journey, but otherwise I don’t remember that we talked a great deal, and we never quarreled. It was as if we were not yet married. Between our college dating and our wedding, there had been a year of separation, with our only contact by mail. Kirby was younger than her years, not in intelligence but in experience. In the ’50s girls were rarely six foot one, and Kirby’s height separated her from her classmates at Miss Fine’s School and at Radcliffe. She was shy, with crushes but without boyfriends. I had the usual girlfriends, but our greatest difference was my single-minded literary obsession. I required a wife who remained passive in the face of my determination."

The American Scholar: One Road - Donald Hall

alielikeus:

Milan cathedral, IT

“The angelus bells were booming like cannons
& the sun that blew out the church’s windows
flooded the cathedral on the castle hill…”

- Vitezslav Nezval, “Defenestration”

(via wasteyoursoul)

shineslikethesun:

Probably my favorite photo from my nature walk yesterday. 

“…to set budding more,
And still more, later flowers for the bees,
Until they think warm days will never cease,
For Summer has o’er-brimm’d their clammy cells.”

- John Keats, “To Autumn”

Reduction – Rethink. →

You didn’t say
“I love you.”
Instead, happy
to be outside,
thoughts about
ideals and banners,
responsibility
and guilt.
A bird flew by,
not a symbol
but a puzzle
and we wondered
about omens.
Then I was hurt.
Your reaction
was swift,
instinctive.
I only hate
how I didn’t think
I was loved
until distress.