(may love find you everywhere)

poet/photographer ::: amaalsaid(dot)com

[be-qarar]

Simple and beautiful and warm.

[amaalsdrifting]

[memoryslandscape-deactivated202]

“Write about love, long evenings, the dawn, the trees, about the endless patience of the light.”

— Adam Zagajewski, from “Letter From a Reader,” Without End: New and Selected Poems (Farrar, Straus, and Grioux, 2002)

[kreativekopf]

Bruno Barbey MOROCCO. Town of Essaouira. 1985. The fishing harbour.

[whentherewerebicycles]

A better question is—how do I want to live the rest of my life and what am I going to do to insure that I get to do it exactly or as close as possible to how I want that living to be? I want to live the rest of my life, however long or short, with as much sweetness as I can decently manage, loving all the people I love, and doing as much as I can of the work I still have to do. I am going to write fire until it comes out my ears, my eyes, my noseholes—everywhere. Until it’s every breath I breathe. I’m going to go out like a fucking meteor!

Audre Lorde, “A Burst of Light: Living with Cancer” (via whentherewerebicycles)

[dhrupad]

Far, far away. Alone, under the open sky. The breeze of the wind, the earth beneath the feet–and her echoing voice between the mountains. Maya, Maya, Maya!

Maya Memsaab (1992)

[violentwavesofemotion-deactivat]

“All day today I’ve had the most gentle, quivering joy, because I’m beginning to heal. Consciously, happily, I feel that I am being born anew, that I am beginning once again to take possession of the light.”

— Nikos Kazantzakis, from a letter to Galateia Kazantzaki wr. c. August 1922

[amaalsdrifting]

Dar es Salaam & the sea.

[adrasteiax]

I am thinking now of grief, and of getting past it

Mary Oliver, from Starlings In Winter in “Owls and Other Fantasies: Poems And Essays”

[amaalsdrifting]

new feelings. there’s joy & gratitude in my heart. discovering poetry (again) in my own time and attempting to leave the shame behind.

[sheabutterbitch]

I was going through some of my notes, and at the top of one page it says, Lean into the discomfort of the work. This was written in the context of the work being done within my career field, but I find it to be applicable to any area of life. “Work,” be it self-healing or recovery work, achieving personal goals, evolving.. it is not always comfortable. Allow yourself to feel the discomfort of it all, acknowledge it.

[merulae]

The first day after a death, the new absence Is always the same; we should be careful Of each other, we should be kind While there is still time.

Philip Larkin, from “The Mower” (via merulae)

[amaalsdrifting]

23 today! survived everything i thought i wouldn’t! alhamdullilah!

[amaalsdrifting]

I think poetry is a way of carrying grief, but it’s also a way of putting it somewhere so I don’t always have to heave it onto my back or in my body. The more I put grief in a poem, the more I am able to move freely through the world because I have named it, spoken it, and thrown it out into the sky. Everyone has grief that they carry and sometimes we have anxiety and depression about anticipatory grief. The thing that I’ve found that helps is knowing we are all in this, someone has gone or is going through the same thing. Poetry helps us with that too. Writing. Reading. As James Baldwin said, “You think your pain and heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, and then you read."

Ada Limón interviewed by Lauren LeBlanc, BOMB Magazine

[jessicarivas-deactivated2020022]

I thought the earth remembered me, she took me back so tenderly, arranging her dark skirts, her pockets full of lichens and seeds. I slept as never before, a stone on the river bed, nothing between me and the white fire of the stars but my thoughts, and they floated light as moths among the branches of the perfect trees. All night I heard the small kingdoms breathing around me, the insects, and the birds who do their work in the darkness. All night I rose and fell, as if in water, grappling with a luminous doom. By morning I had vanished at least a dozen times into something better.

from Sleeping In The Forest, 1978 by Mary Oliver (via jessicarivas)

[twofigs]

i work hard at managing, grateful 
and spare. i try to forgive all trespasses 
and give thanks for the desert. rejoice 
in being alive here in my simple world. 
each evening i walk for an hour, paying 
attention to real things. the plover 
sweeping at my face to get me away from its ground nest. an ant carrying the wing of a butterfly like a flag in the wind. 
a grasshopper eating a dead grasshopper. the antelope close up, just staring at me. back in the house, i lie down in the heat for a nap, realizing forgiveness is hard for the wounded. near the border, between this country and the next one.

surviving love, linda gregg

[amaalsdrifting]

not pictured: sitting in the next room and hearing her mum & aunt discuss her dead body. her mum comforting another woman weeping, saying, you have to be strong. 

I didn’t know S as an adult. that’s the first thing I thought about on the morning of her burial and it made me cry. her laugh came back to me the day after. the day after that I remembered her perfume. I was sitting at my desk and I thought I smelt her. we grew up together and then nobody said a word. we didn’t check in. I saw her twice in the last 4 years. it was accidental each time and we stopped only for a short conversation. 

memories are coming back. we came home together. how did I forget that? we lived a couple roads away from each other. we always stayed on the bus longer to finish our conversation. we shared chips. we were in love with boys who didn’t know we existed, and then we weren’t.

there’s nobody like her. it’s hard to describe. I don’t have any pictures and I loved her so much.