last swan song.

swans stay silent until their death when they sing a single, hauntingly beautiful last song. xxvii. they/them.

[teddypng]

Patricia Highsmith, Her Diaries and Notebooks: 1941-1995

[geryone]

If You Love That Lady, Maya C. Popa

[lifeinpoetry]

I want to stay on the back porch while the world tilts toward sleep, until what I love misses me, and calls me in.

— Dorianne Laux, from “On the Back Porch,” Only As the Day Is Long: New and Selected Poems

[folklorespring]

"great water triptych" by Iryna Shuvalova, translated by Uilleam Blacker. Written in the aftermath of Russians blowing up Kakhovka Dam in Ukraine in 2023 and flooding over 620 km².

[petaltexturedskies]

Gabriele D'Annunzio, The Virgins

[existential-celestial]

“Songs of continued years I sing.”

— Walt Whitman, “As Consequent, etc.,” in WHITMAN (The Laurel Poetry Series).

[nixscriptum]

[paper-wounds]

Fortesa Latifi, from The Truth About Grief.

[soracities]

Charles Wright, from "A Journal of the Year of the Ox", The World of Ten Thousand Things: Poems 1980-1990 [ID'd]

[weltenwellen]

Ambalila Hemsell, from "Party Poem"

[atoubaa]

A wedding in a refugee camp near Khartoum. (Sudan, 1995) - Pascal Maitre

[petaltexturedskies]

March came in that winter like the meekest and mildest of lambs, bringing days that were crisp and golden and tingling, each followed by a frosty pink twilight which gradually lost itself in an elfland of moonshine.

L.M. Montgomery, Anne of The Island

[feral-ballad]

Tawanda Mulalu, from Please Make Me Pretty, I Don't Want to Die: Poems; “All we got was autumn. All we got was winter”

[kafk-a]

Nancy Willard, from “Questions My Son Asked Me, Answers I Never Gave Him”

[devilduck]

“My brother used to ask the birds to forgive him; that sounds senseless, but it is right; for all is like an ocean, all things flow and touch each other; a disturbance in one place is felt at the other end of the world…”

Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov.

[petaltexturedskies]

Emily Dickinson, in a letter to Abiah Root, dated 23 February 1845 from The Letters of Emily Dickinson

[exhaled-spirals]

— René Char, Selected Poems of René Char