+ "

To stand in the shadow
of the scar up in the air.

To stand-for-no-one-and-nothing.
Unrecognized,
for you alone.

With all there is room for in that,
even without
language.

"
— Paul Celan, “To stand”, translated by Michael Hamburger

+ "How weightless
words are when nothing will do."
—

Philip Levine, from “Gospel”

Favourite final sentences

(via the-final-sentence)

+ "Regarding myself as a mere echo,
Cave-like, unintelligible, nocturnal…

May 27, 1956
Hospital
Moscow"
— Anna Akhmatova, from The Complete Poems, translated by Judith Hemschemeyer

+ "

i

In view of the fading animals
the proliferation of sewers and fears
the sea clogging, the air
nearing extinction

we should be kind, we should
take warning, we should forgive each other

Instead we are opposite, we
touch as though attacking,

the gifts we bring
even in good faith maybe
warp in our hands to
implements, to manoeuvres

ii

Put down the target of me
you guard inside your binoculars,
in turn I will surrender

this aerial photograph
(your vulnerable
sections marked in red)
I have found so useful

See, we are alone in
the dormant field, the snow
that cannot be eaten or captured

iii

Here there are no armies
here there is no money

It is cold and getting colder,

We need each others’
breathing, warmth, surviving
is the only war
we can afford, stay

walking with me, there is almost
time / if we can only
make it as far as

the (possibly) last summer

"
— Margaret Atwood, “They are hostile nations”

+ "That was the year, my twenty-eighth, when I was discovering that not all of the promises would be kept, that some things are in fact irrevocable and that it had counted after all, every evasion and every procrastination, every mistake, every word, all of it."
— Joan Didion, from Slouching Towards Bethlehem

+ "Lovers find secret places
inside this violent world
where they make transactions
with beauty."
— Rumi, opening lines to “Secret Places”, in Bridge to the Soul, translated by Coleman Barks

+ "What are days for?
Days are where we live.
They come, they wake us
Time and time over.
They are to be happy in:
Where can we live but days?"
— Philip Larkin, from “Days”

+ "I didn’t choose poetry: poetry chose me."
— Philip Larkin

(Source: theparisreview)

+ "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

+ "We are the pioneers

of our own histories, drawn
to the horizon as if we waited just for us

the way the young are drawn
to the future, the old to the past."
— Linda Pastan, from “Driving West”, in Traveling Light