grintoforever:

tonight i watched a documentary that made me realize i have spent far too long being far too quiet about something very serious. something i could be speaking out about and helping other people who are going through it right now. for too long i have been ashamed to admit that when i was 13 years…

deniigi-studios:

Yolo

thespacecoyote:

If I remember more than a half of this con it will be a miracle

O tree spreading like the tree of the species

meant for us birds as a green house

under the held breath of spinning spheres

in sand and clay in clay and sand

in the midst of deserts where a loving wind

brings only dry rain of ashes
 

how can we live anywhere else but in this one tree

where we hear thick drops of falling bees

and the pitcher full of leaves is humming
 

a small bird I know my place I do

chained to a branch I would like to be a leaf

the smallest trembling leaf
 

   —because the one who abandons the tree will perish

   says the wise snake who lives in the tree

   winds round the tree and rules the tree

   he will die from thirst and hunger and fear of himself

   even if he gives flight the beautiful name of freedom
 

   I tell you truly says the wise snake

   if you are not obedient like the leaves

   as humble weak and docile to winds

   you will perish and all traces of you will perish—
 

a small bird I know my value I do

I am not like the cricket who sits under a stone

free light-hearted because all he has is a shell

soon to be left behind— an empty monument

for we have history and ruins of nests

and houses wisely lined with down

and a school of singing we are certain

will outlast the mute unmusical swarms of stars

—when a bird dies a hole in the sky suddenly opens

and gray dust pours on the greenness of the earth—
 

*
 

the sacrifice of wings hurts at first

and you can sing about this pain

then you come to love immobility

and fear composes the song’s words
 

delaying a verdict with song

obedient to the instinct of life

we hide a spark of rebellion deep inside

when we praise sweet violence
 

   long odes come through the narrow throat

   the throat surely bursts from this
 

   and the heart bursts when the still eyes

   are brought too close
 

   you who read a book under the tree

   and are a bird among people
 

   the quill of this pen is for you—

   if you can write an elegy for my decease
 

   with the pen preserve the colors

   of fear love and despair

   perhaps you will write with it a poem

   about the fate of birds in cruel times

—Zbigniew Herbert, trans. John and Bogdana Carpenter

All the new thinking is about loss.

In this it resembles all the old thinking.

The idea, for example, that each particular erases

the luminous clarity of a general idea. That the clown-

faced woodpecker probing the dead sculpted trunk

of that black birch is, by his presence,

some tragic falling off from a first world

of undivided light. Or the other notion that,

because there is in this world no one thing

to which the bramble of blackberry corresponds,

a word is elegy to what it signifies.

We talked about it late last night and in the voice

of my friend, there was a thin wire of grief, a tone

almost querulous. After a while I understood that,

talking this way, everything dissolves: justice,

pine, hair, woman, you and I. There was a woman

I made love to and I remembered how, holding

her small shoulders in my hands sometimes,

I felt a violent wonder at her presence

like a thirst for salt, for my childhood river

with its island willows, silly music from the pleasure boat,

muddy places where we caught the little orange-silver fish

called pumpkinseed. It hardly had to do with her.

Longing, we say, because desire is full

of endless distances. I must have been the same to her.

But I remember so much, the way her hands dismantled bread,

the thing her father said that hurt her, what

she dreamed. There are moments when the body is as numinous

as words, days that are the good flesh continuing.

Such tenderness, those afternoons and evenings,

saying blackberry, blackberry, blackberry.

— Robert Hass

Everyone forgets that Icarus also flew.

It’s the same when love comes to an end,

or the marriage fails and people say

they knew it was a mistake, that everybody

said it would never work. That she was 

old enough to know better. But anything

worth doing is worth doing badly.

Like being there by that summer ocean

on the other side of the island while

love was fading out of her, the stars 

burning so extravagantly those nights that

anyone could tell you they would never last.

Every morning she was asleep in my bed

like a visitation, the gentleness in her

like antelope standing in the dawn mist.

Each afternoon I watched her coming back

through the hot stony field after swimming,

the sea light behind her and the huge sky

on the other side of that. Listened to her

while we ate lunch. How can they say 

the marriage failed? Like the people who

came back from Provence (when it was Provence)

and said it was pretty but the food was greasy.

I believe Icarus was not failing as he fell,

but just coming to the end of his triumph.
 

— Jack Gilbert