sad girls inherit the earth

"nafyahay wanaag baad ku weynaatay wa waajib inaad waya aragta."

[unchildhood]

MARY OLIVER

Thirst (2006);

original photos and edit

[pigmenting]

“the sea & beach move into each other’s mouths particle by particle; each one wanders the big rooms of the other. O, god, let us love like they love.”

— Aracelis Girmay, from “La Boda Del Mar Y Arena” in Kingdom Animalia

[memoryslandscape-deactivated202]

“If poets are the keepers of the unsayable, then silence, not language, is a poet’s natural element, the realm where the unsayable lives. Poets fetishize silence as much as words; they are disturbed and comforted by the sounds that interrupt it. This is what John Keats means by Negative Capability, his notion of a poet’s basic qualification, the need for ‘being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason.’ This a fancy way of describing ambivalence, also a basic qualification fro a poet, the ability to passionately hold two opposing feelings at once. Poets need ambivalence in order to acknowledge the unsayable and speak nonetheless. The hidden subject of all poems is the silence that surrounds them, the things that can’t be, that will never be said; a real poem points to everything beyond it.”

Craig Morgan Teicher, from “Ars Poetica: Origin Stories,” The American Poetry Review (vol. 47, no. 5, September/October 2018)

[lifeinpoetry]

“A hysteric is a girl who can’t be / disappeared”

— Brynne Rebele-Henry, from “The pathos of fertility, 1921, Germany,” Autobiography of a Wound

[memoryslandscape-deactivated202]

“This world is cruel, even to itself, The white lilies prey on the blue.”

— D. Nurkse, from section 3 of “Prelude” Love in the Last Days: After Tristan and Iseult (Alfred A. Knopf, 2017)

[nomadmanifesto]

i think i’m in love!! or at least i am on the edge of love and with time could find myself there. and i think this person might love me too. but i keep stalling, keep ducking from clarity, shying from directness. i think that in this strange uncertain space we occupy there is so much hope and whimsy on my end. this could be whatever i want, whatever i need. there is a finality that would come with knowing that i am not sure i am ready for. it would demand an action. and i’m too scared for that right now.

how do two scared people come to love each other in spite of their fears? how do we learn to do this still afraid?

[twofigs]

i work hard at managing, grateful 
and spare. i try to forgive all trespasses 
and give thanks for the desert. rejoice 
in being alive here in my simple world. 
each evening i walk for an hour, paying 
attention to real things. the plover 
sweeping at my face to get me away from its ground nest. an ant carrying the wing of a butterfly like a flag in the wind. 
a grasshopper eating a dead grasshopper. the antelope close up, just staring at me. back in the house, i lie down in the heat for a nap, realizing forgiveness is hard for the wounded. near the border, between this country and the next one.

surviving love, linda gregg

[herzgewachse]

it’s not about wanting to see signs everywhere, but understanding that there are many different types of language. how many times life has talked to me without words

[theartsyproject]

Enrique Serra Auqué, The Orange Seller, c. 1890.

[nomadmanifesto]

i can’t believe it’s 2018 and i’m on tumblr dot com blogging about the fact that i’m sad about a boy.

[memoryslandscape-deactivated202]

“When I speak to you of love I do not speak as I am but as I am in love with you which is better that I am, better than I can hope to be.”

— Wendell Berry, section IV of “Sabbaths,” Oxford American (Spring 2018)

[greedywinter]

“All my love—and all its ashes.”

— Heinrich Heine, from Book of Songs; “Where is Now your Precious Darling,” (via violentwavesofemotion)

[lifeinpoetry]

I love you like a vulture loves / the careless deer at the roadside.

Traci Brimhall, from “Love Poem Without a Drop of Hyperbole in It,” published in The New Yorker (via lifeinpoetry)

[larmoyante]

Do you understand the sadness of geography?

Michael Ondaatje, from The English Patient (McCelland and Stewart, 1992)

[theclassicsreader]

I am desperately looking the other way so that love won’t see me.

Jeanette Winterson, Written on the Body (via theclassicsreader)

[historium]

Somali Communist Poster - The sword of the Revolution will not miss you, O you who got rich by crooked means. “Bringing the revolution back to course.” -1969

[nomadmanifesto]

i spent the last few days at the ocean and wanted to cry because the sea and sky were so beautiful. i wanted everyone i loved on the shore with me so we could look at the sky together and weep. i felt everything and didn’t have words for it or a place to carry it all. i wanted to be in love and for that love to be actualized and to freeze the world and that moment of beauty forever. i felt drunk by beauty. i wrote an embarrassing poem no one else in the world will ever see because all i had in that moment was the certainty of cliche. i had nothing to say that hasn’t already been said before.