[brujean]

I wish children didn't die. I wish they would be temporarily elevated to the skies until the war ends.

Then they would return home safe, and when their parents would ask them: Where were you? They would say: We were playing in the clouds.

— Ghassan Kanafani (1936-1972)

[dappledwithshadow]

Vincent van Gogh Still Life with French Novels and Glass with a Rose 1887

[kafk-a]

Sanna Wani

[luthienne]

“I beg you to have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don’t search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters To A Young Poet (via fables-of-the-reconstruction)

[weltenwellen]

Hieu Minh Nguyen, from “Heavy”

[malojasnake]

— Sunrise, by Louise Glück

[petaltexturedskies]

Mary Shelley, Lodore (originally published in 1835)

[mournfulroses]

Neha Malhokra, from a poem titled "Menaka," featured in Not a muse : the inner lives of women : a world poetry anthology

[petaltexturedskies]

Clarice Lispector, The Hour of the Star

[flowerytale]

Anne Carson, from The Glass Essay

[aridante]

Ottessa Moshfegh, What Forms of Art, Activism, and Literature Can Speak Authentically Today?

[2manypdfs]

opening paragraphs of all time

The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson

We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson

[primulaceas]

Mary Oliver, "Love Sorrow." Red Bird

[lunamonchtuna]

“Sometimes being offered tenderness feels like the very proof that you have been ruined.”

— Ocean Vuong, from On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous

[weltenwellen]

Joy Sullivan, from "Late Bloomer", Instructions for Traveling West

[havingapoemwithyou]

[may my heart always be open to little] by e. e. cummings

[petaltexturedskies]

Ada Limón, “Instructions on Not Giving Up” in The Carrying: Poems (originally published in 2017)