H.D. my patron saint @maiabaia - Tumblr Blog

elwenyere

— Ursula K. Le Guin, from “A Rant About ‘Technology’”

weltenwellen

For years I lived Maggie Smith

birdandvine

Good Morning, I Am Not Going to Commit Suicide Today, by Kimmy Walters

wovi

apoemaday

God

by Michael Bazzett

for Ada Limón

Look, it’s not that I believe in him. Nor he in me. We have moved beyond all that. I just like having someone there in the dark. Usually we sit in silence, waiting for passing headlights to glide across the ceiling and knock stray prayers loose from where they got stuck on their way out, so many years ago. It’s almost like finding old piñata candy, says God, picking one from the floorboards. He unwraps it, takes a quick taste. Winces. Nods like he’s just remembered something for the thousandth, thousandth time. What is it? I ask. It’s kind of like chewing tinfoil, he says. All that aching naked hope.

sea-starved

Some More Light Verse Wendy Cope

You have to try. You see the shrink. You learn a lot. You read. You think. You struggle to improve your looks. You meet some men. You write some books. You eat good food. You give up junk. You do not smoke. You don’t get drunk. You take up yoga, walk and swim. And nothing works. The outlook’s grim. You don’t know what to do. You cry. You’re running out of things to try.

You blow your nose. You see the shrink. You walk. You give up food and drink. You fall in love. You make a plan. You struggle to improve your man. And nothing works. The outlooks grim. You go to yoga, cry and swim. You eat and drink. You give up looks. You struggle to improve your books. You cannot see the point. You sigh. You do not smoke. You have to try.

violettesiren

As I pull the bucket from the crude well, the water changes from dark to a light more silver than the sun. When I pour it over my body that is standing in the dust by the oleander bush, it sparkles easily in the sunlight with an earnestness like the spirit close up. The water magnifies the sun all along the length of it. Love is not less because of the spirit. Delight does not make the heart childish. We thought the blood thinned, our weight lessened, that our substance was reduced by simple happiness. The oleander is thick with leaves and flowers because of spilled water. Let the spirit marry the heart. When I return naked to the stone porch, there is no one to see me glistening. But I look at the almond tree with its husks cracking open int he heat. I look down the whole mountain to the sea. Goats bleating faintly and sometimes bells. I stand there a long time with the sun and the quiet, the earth moving slowly as I dry in the light.

Glistening by Linda Gregg

havingapoemwithyou

The Suitor by Jane Kenyon

watermotif

So, your life. There it is before you – possibly a road, a ribbon, a dotted line, a map – let’s say you’re 25, then you make some decisions, do things, have setbacks, have triumphs, become someone, a bus driver, a professor of Indo-European linguistics, a pirate, a cosmetologist, years pass, maybe in a family maybe not, maybe happy maybe not, then one day you wake up and you’re seventy. Looking ahead you see a black doorway. You begin to notice the black doorway is always there, at the edge, whether you look at it or not. Most moments contain it, most moments have a sort of sediment of black doorway at the bottom of the glass. You wonder if other people are seeing it too. You ask them. They say no. You ask why. No one can tell you.

A minute ago you were 25. Then you went ahead getting the life you want. One day you looked back from 25 to now and there it is, the doorway, black, waiting.

— anne carson, gloves on!