April 2013
1 tag
hiddenshores:
There are hidden shores within us. Places we will never reach, places that will reach us instead.
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A sort-of goodbye
I need to move on from growing orbits, to somewhere new, unscathed.
Perhaps we will find each other there. x
3 tags
by Elger Esser
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“To stand in the shadow
of the scar up in the air.
To...”
– Paul Celan, “To stand”, translated by Michael Hamburger
6 tags
“How weightless
words are when nothing will do.”
– Philip Levine, from “Gospel”
Favourite final sentences
1 tag
I don’t mean to sound so gloomy, but this space has been getting to me. I find it increasingly fleeting, anonymous and irritating. At the moment I am trying to find reasons to stay and it’s not coming easy.
Life is stressful, work is hard and my heart is receiving some form of life support. I have been trying to lift myself, with good company, healthy food, lots of exercise, and as...
4 tags
“Regarding myself as a mere echo,
Cave-like, unintelligible, nocturnal…...”
– Anna Akhmatova, from The Complete Poems, translated by Judith Hemschemeyer
1 tag
You tell me it’s summer, you tell me that there are skies so blue it hurts to look at them. Here it seems like winter still, despite all the annoying blossoms. I feel out of place, I want to rip whatever beat there is left out of my chest. Take it, I don’t need it no more.
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Absence
See also: the state of being away, absent-minded, leave of absence, perhaps I was never really here and I don’t know how to return.
6 tags
“i
In view of the fading animals
the proliferation of sewers and fears
the...”
– Margaret Atwood, “They are hostile nations”
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1 tag
I wish I could grow outside my skin sometimes, pack bags, spread wings.
I equally yearn for the metaphorical and the literal.
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“That was the year, my twenty-eighth, when I was discovering that not all of the...”
– Joan Didion, from Slouching Towards Bethlehem
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“I wish I wrote the way I thought
Obsessively
Incessantly
With maddening...”
– Benedict Smith, “I Wish I Wrote The Way I Thought”
“Every day the sun rises
out of low word-clouds
into burning silence.”
– Rumi, from “Secret Places”, translated by Coleman Barks
Posted on the-final-sentence
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“Lovers find secret places
inside this violent world
where they make...”
– Rumi, opening lines to “Secret Places”, in Bridge to the Soul, translated by Coleman Barks
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“What are days for?
Days are where we live.
They come, they wake us
Time...”
– Philip Larkin, from “Days”
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“I didn’t choose poetry: poetry chose me.”
– Philip Larkin
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“What we feel most has
no name but amber, archers, cinnamon, horses, and birds.”
– Jack Gilbert, from “The Forgotten Dialect of the Heart”
Favourite final sentences
6 tags
“We are the pioneers
of our own histories, drawn
to the horizon as if we waited...”
– Linda Pastan, from “Driving West”, in Traveling Light
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Bully by Cat Power (Live on Later… with Jools...
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I have a word for it— the way the surface waited all day to be a silvery pause between sky and city— which is elver.
— Eavan Boland, opening lines to “Cityscape”
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“The world
is still not real;
time wonders:
all that is certain
is the heat...”
– Octavio Paz, from “Before the Beginning”, in A Tree Within, translated by Eliot Weinberger
1 tag
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basis, n. There has to be a moment at the beginning when you won- der whether you’re in love with the person or in love with the feeling of love itself. If the moment doesn’t pass, that’s it—you’re done. And if the moment does pass, it never goes that far. It stands in the distance, ready for whenever you want it back. Sometimes it’s even there when you thought you were search- ing for something...
6 tags
“I ask not out of sorrow, but in wonder.”
– Czesław Miłosz, from “Encounter”, translated by Czesław Miłosz and Lillian Vallee
Favourite final sentences
5 tags
Of Being
I know this happiness is provisional: the looming presences— great suffering, great fear— withdraw only into peripheral vision: but ineluctable this shimmering of wind in the blue leaves: this flood of stillness widening the lake of sky: this need to dance, this need to kneel: this mystery:
— Denise...
1 tag
milky coffee and hazy sunshine the city quiet, birds singing relentlessly I want to stay in this place a while longer Sunday’s calm, unspoilt and unspoken
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“What a strange thing!
to be alive
beneath cherry blossoms.”
– Kobayashi Issa, in The Essential Haiku: Versions of Basho, Buson, and Issa, translated by Robert Hass
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“I have
time for grief
And time for love
And I trust
my fits of sorrow to the...”
– Hassan El Ouazzani, from “A Truce”, translated by Widad Mountacer
5 tags
‘I am’ in Sylvia Plath’s “Three Women”
F I R S T V O I C E
I am as slow as the world. I am very patient. I am a great event. I am ready.
I am calm. I am calm. It is the calm before something awful. I am dumb and brown. I am a seed about to break. I am the centre of an atrocity. I shall be a wall and a roof, protecting. I shall be a sky and a hill of good. I am...
6 tags
Turner, Late Painting
This almost empty canvas is sister to an empty page just as a poem enters: white with all its possibilities emerging from the brush— smoke or cloud or beach foam— and there in the corner a patch of burnt orange where the sun will eventually come up.
— Linda Pastan, in Traveling Light
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The Butternut Tree at Fort Juniper
I called the tree a butternut (which I don’t think it is) so I could talk about how different the trees are around me here in the rain. It reminds me how mutable language is. Keats would leave blank spaces in his drafts to hold on to his passion, spaces for the right words to come. We use them sideways. The way we automatically add bits of shape to hold...
5 tags
“But I still love the relative, not the absolute: the cabbage and the warmth of a...”
– Anaïs Nin, from The Diary of Anaïs Nin, Vol. 1 1931-1934, edited by Gunther Stuhlmann
Favourite final sentences
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“I need to be alone … I need the sunshine and the paving stones of the streets...”
– Henry Miller, from Tropic of Cancer
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abberant, adj.
“I don’t normally do this kind of thing,” you said. “Neither do I,” I assured you. Later it turned out we had both met people online before, and we had both slept with people on first dates before, and we had both found ourselves falling too fast before. But we com- forted ourselves with what we really meant to say, which was: “I don’t...
3 tags
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“Our fragments made us.”
– Margaret Atwood, from “Two-Headed Poems”
6 tags
Invitation
Oh do you have time to linger for just a little while out of your busy
and very important day for the goldfinches that have gathered in a field of thistles
for a musical battle, to see who can sing the highest note, or the lowest,
or the most expressive of mirth, or the most tender? Their strong blunt beaks drink the air
as they strive melodiously not for your sake and not for...
6 tags
Pulse
This is not how hearts begin to beat, in twos sitting in trees. Soaked birds say we’re cold, and go inside. No one around us has a problem breathing. Whole branches collapse under the weight of ice and skin. Nations cave in the time it takes a heart to stop beating. And what of surrender? The beggar’s touch? The beating of a bird’s wings can sound like the start of...
1 tag
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A Prayer That Will Be Answered
Lord let me suffer a lot and then let me die
Allow me to walk through silence Let nothing not even fear linger after me
Make the world go on as it always has let the sea continue to kiss the shore
Let grass still remain green so a little frog could find shelter in it
and someone could bury his face and weep his heart out
Make a day dawn so bright it seems...
5 tags
“… sometimes I miss you
the way someone drowning
remembers the air.”
– Tim Seibles, from “Slow Dance”
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I needed this new beginning
April Wild and cold Stormy and grey There is a hope of spring Somewhere beyond these clouds
The blossom is still a bud
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