poetry

[animal-mints]

The time will come when, with elation, you will greet yourself arriving at your own door, in your own mirror and each will smile at the other’s welcome, and say, sit here. Eat. You will love again the stranger who was your self. Give wine. Give bread, Give back your heart to itself, to the stranger who has loved you all your life, whom you ignored for another, who knows you by heart. Take down the love letters from the bookshelf the photographs, the desperate notes, peel your own image from the mirror. Sit. Feast on your life.

Derek Walcott, Love after Love

[animal-mints]

I find a kind of hope here, in this homelessness, in this place where no one knows me — where I’ll be gone, like some over-wintering bird, before they even notice. Healed by distance and a landscape opening under broken sun, I like this mirror-less, flawless world with no people in it, only birds. Unmissed, I can see myself again in this great unfurling — the song, the fledged leaf, the wing; in these strong trees that twist from the bud: their grey beginning to green.

Robin Robertson, Beginning To Green

[animal-mints]

Iron are our lives Molten right through our youth. A burnt space through ripe fields, A fair mouth’s broken tooth.

From August 1914, Isaac Rosenberg

[animal-mints]

The stones threaten Window grins treachery Branches strangle Mountainous bushes rattle (rustle) off leaves Shrieking Death

August Stramm, Patrol (translated by John Hollander)