(via borderofthesea)
Warsan Shire
via http://weissewiese.tumblr.com/post/44210503580
(Source: warsanshire)
Burn all of your bridges
just so that you can build them again
with thicker ropes.
Hurt all the people you love
and then commit every felony to win them back.
Drown yourself in bleach until not even Heaven’s light
can compare to how bright you can burn.
Turn yourself inside out
and paint your organs the color of what you see
in your dreams.
This is the art of
living with a ticking heart — a grenade you
throw through windows to make a
point that language
has no room for.
This is how I destroyed you. And this, is how
I kept you alive.
Dig yourself a ditch, six
feet deep, and bury everything that you’ve ever
said, everything that you’ve never
meant, and everything that has
burned you and left you with nothing
but ash.
There among us in infinity and solitude,
life sparked and blazed in warm corners
and in the brace of other-worldly lands.
It is there I hold memories of life and the silent frenzy.
They resonate in my body and happily play.
On this land, no King, Queen or Emperor
No Lord or pilgrim.
The sky and sea do not talk back
They meet in chaos and beauty
One melting its cold hypnotic hues
into that vast sea world with its erratic expression.
We stand and watch, I held you there on the beach,
clutching each other, as we formed our place.
The cosmic wind stampeding across the sea rushing around us.
I felt our feet rooting to that ground
As it could only whirl in orbit as we glow our presence in this world
I fantasized it took us and consumed us in its place,
Lost from past and time. I know there is that place.
I have seen a hundred autumn trees
raised from the soil— great and ancient
weightless rising to the sky
to move in droves around the world—
roots hung limp
save for their slow tendril
searching through the blue
these great trees were beautiful
but for their wilting in the clouds
and their rubble of soil
breaking, as it fell,
the image of the night’s half moon
in a distant lake.
Absent now some three years
I walk the mass of holes you left,
as if a war had passed, and think—
happiness seems a silly wilting thing
and nothing like the lasting ground—
I love.
When I say,
”And at night
I watched the storm— alone”
do you see
the sky erupt
in sheets of rain,
fingers of lightning
moving in the clouds
like a chill across the spine of the world?
