blues and bare bones

Poetry. Literature. Bookish Things. Music. Photos. My name is Amy. Writings not attributed are my own.

[bluesandbarebones]

Autumn remains

Even on the cusp of summer through the burgeoning and the blossoming— a resistance a chill a closing down On the ground the muted colors of Autumn remain trinkets of nostalgia evidence ignored I am wrapped in the scratchy wool of your absence a scarf of bitterness I cannot remove despite its warmth Ignore me like the life vest you scorned like sunscreen hydration (Summer can kill when your back is turned) I'll stay here in the slow decay of hope roosting in the dark attic of my mistakes

[weltenwellen]

L. A. Johnson, from "Birthmark"

[apoemaday]

It Was Like This: You Were Happy

by Jane Hirshfield

It was like this: you were happy, then you were sad, then happy again, then not.

It went on. You were innocent or you were guilty. Actions were taken, or not.

At times you spoke, at other times you were silent. Mostly, it seems you were silent — what could you say?

Now it is almost over.

Like a lover, your life bends down and kisses your life.

It does this not in forgiveness — between you, there is nothing to forgive — but with the simple nod of a baker at the moment he sees the bread is finished with transformation.

Eating, too, is a thing now only for others.

It doesn’t matter what they will make of you or your days: they will be wrong, they will miss the wrong woman, miss the wrong man, all the stories they tell will be tales of their own invention.

Your story was this: you were happy, then you were sad, you slept, you awakened. Sometimes you ate roasted chestnuts, sometimes persimmons.

[disguisedfeelings]

Of all sad words of tongue or pen, the saddest are these, "It might have been."

John Greenleaf Whittier

[luthienne]

The thoughts in my head are sometimes so clear and so sharp and my feelings so deep, but writing about them comes hard. The main difficulty, I think, is a sense of shame. So many inhibitions, so much fear of letting go, of allowing things to pour out of me, and yet that is what I must do if I am ever to give my life a reasonable and satisfactory purpose.

Etty Hillesum, from a diary entry featured in An Interrupted Life: the Diaries, 1941-1943 and Letters from Westerbork (translated from the Dutch by Arnold J. Pomerans)

[mournfulroses]

Anaïs Nin, from a diary entry featured in The Diary of Anais Nin, Vol. 3. (1923-1927)

[mournfulroses]

Sylvia Plath, from a diary entry featured in The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

[havingapoemwithyou]

I Guess By Now I Thought I’d Be Done With Shame by Franny Choi

[ymutate]

Deborah Poynton (born in 1970). South African

To Be Possessed (2025)

Oil on canvas

190 x 230 cm, 75 x 91 in approx

[bluesandbarebones]

Love like trees

We love without expectation, a simple kind of love, lacking the costumed finery of romance, the quickened heartbeat that comes from anticipation, or the motion of being swept. It is the steady breathing in and out of the forest, the way the trees stand still, arms open, waiting for the wind to caress their limbs. They do not bend with want or desire, yet they are ravishing and grow together, touching slowly, roots unseen yet entwined.

[quotespile]

“For the best part of 40 years she had genuinely believed that not doing things would somehow prevent regret, when, of course, the exact opposite was true.”

— Nick Hornby, Juliet, Naked

[c0ssette]

[ancientsstudies]

Middleton Place by antoinebn.

[thesixthduke]

Classical views

[sonsofadam]

Praetorian Guards

[bluesandbarebones]

"In early June the world of leaf and blade and flowers explodes, and every sunset is different.” —John Steinbeck, The Winter of Our Discontent

[bluesandbarebones]

Transparency

is a thing required of raindrops. I cannot hide my weight in a cloud, nor fall effortlessly across your arms. There is something that leaps when I remember your storm and still, in the warm calm of spring I am frozen, lying in the place where lightning struck a hollow heart.