1000 and 1 Poems on Love

[catsapprentice]

[catsapprentice]

"... imaginations are genderless wombs." - Sulaiman Addonia, The Seers

[catsapprentice]

#poetry #foroughfarrokhzad

[catsapprentice]

"As if we had, with our own hands, created each other's bodies out of the darkness. " - Geetanjali Shree, The Roof Beneath Their Feet

[catsapprentice]

[catsapprentice]

"The body has no simple theology. We reinvent and realign our constellations as we wander; our old sailing stars will not do forever." - Gabrielle Bellot, Volcano Dreams

[catsapprentice]

[catsapprentice]

"My tongue will tell the anger of my heart, or else my heart concealing it will break" - Shakespeare, Taming of the Shrew

[catsapprentice]

[catsapprentice]

[catsapprentice]

[catsapprentice]

Questions for my Mother

How do you squeeze love

From a body

That has no love left inside

How do you make stone into fire?

Must you salt your wounds

To allow all the pain to seep out

And be collected

Must you wring the lost love

From the folds in your skin

Must you invent new words that

Mean something close to love

That approximate it’s warmth but

Never encompass it’s breadth

Must you string along promises

On a necklace

To be broken or lost along the way

How do you summon love into your lap?

How do you conjure love onto the table?

How can you make love out of empty air?

[catsapprentice]

Nikki Giovanni

[catsapprentice]

Messenger - Abdul Bari Jahani

Who are you to remind me of old memories? My heart was restless. You brought it further unrest you opened wounds from the past. Where do you come from? Who lead you here? I do not know anyone. My beloved and I do not know each other. I do not deal with messengers of love anymore. I burnt my wings on my own. I do not envy flowers nor do I seek their beauty. Leave me alone. I expect no visitors. Consider false what you saw yesterday. Love became estranged. I have ceased struggling.

I am exhausted from the desert running. I bought a house by the sea. I surrendered to the hunter. I accepted sleeping in a cage. I broke my wings. Do not remind me of those unruly wild dreams anymore.

Go back the way you came. Let me enjoy my last days. Take the message back home. Give my regards to old friends. These frail hands Cannot withstand time. These retreated soldiers will no longer fight.

- Translated from the Pashto by Fareda Ahmadi

[catsapprentice]

"I almost never wept for him, I just stopped looking at the sky the way I used to." - Kamel Daoud, The Meursault Investigation, trans. John Cullen

[catsapprentice]

"She had thought that when someone died, it would be like they went into a different room. She had not known that life itself transformed into a different room and trapped you in it without them. She wanted her father to know how bad she was feeling. She didn't want to get over the pain. She didn't have the energy to make the best of it. She didn't see what purpose it would serve to make the best of something in a world that felt stripped of any arrows, any direction, any sense. Who would she be making the best of it for? Herself? She didn't care about herself. Her father, who wasn't there? The living? It was the dead who needed our love, the dead who she wanted to be loyal to, the dead who needed us most. The living could take care of themselves, going to the grocery store and all that sunshine. It was the dead who needed to be held onto so they would not slip away. Who would save the dead from oblivion if not we the living? She would have to hold onto her father forever so he would not slip away." - Sheila Heti, Pure Colour

[catsapprentice]

"My memory begins with my anger." - Jacqueline Harpman, I Who Have Never Known Men