field notes @parchmentfolly - Tumblr Blog

"There is a vitality, a life force, an energy, a quickening that is translated through you into action, and because there is only one of you in all of time, this expression is unique. And if you block it, it will never exist through any other medium and it will be lost. The world will not have it. It is not your business to determine how good it is nor how valuable nor how it compares with other expressions. It is your business to keep it yours clearly and directly, to keep the channel open."

-Martha Graham

geryone

Find Me as the Creature I Am, Emily Jungmin Yoon

weltenwellen

Wildness Before Something Sublime Leila Chatti

ihopeuwill

All the years of my life I thought I was searching for love I found, retrospectively, to be years where I was simply trying to recover what had been lost, to return to the first home, to get back the rapture of first love. I was not really ready to love or be loved in the present. I was still mourning-- clinging to the broken heart of girlhood, to broken connections.

from All About Love: New Visions, bell hooks

apoemaday

Bright Star

by John Keats

Bright star, would I were steadfast as thou art – Not in lone splendor hung aloft the night And watching, with eternal lids apart Like nature’s patient, sleepless Eremite, The moving waters at their priestlike task Of pure ablution ‘round earth’s human shores, Or gazing on the new soft-fallen mask Of snow upon the mountains and the moors – No – yet still steadfast, still unchangeable, Pillow’d upon my fair love’s ripening breast, To feel forever its soft fall and swell, Awake forever in a sweet unrest, Still, still to hear her tender-taken breath, And so live ever – or else swoon to death.

shisasan

16 April, 1939 Letters to Véra by Vladimir Nabokov

theoptia

Clarice Lispector, from A Breath of Life

lunchboxpoems

WENDY COPE

mournfulroses

Izzy Ravas, from her novel titled Disarm: A Forbidden Romance (What We Don't Say,)

kosmogrl

on grief.

petaltexturedskies

You already know the story. You will die. Everyone you love will also die. You will lose them forever. You will be sad and angry. You will weep. You will bargain. You will make demands. You will beg. You will pray. It will make no difference. Nothing you can do will bring them back. You know this. Your knowing changes nothing. This poem will make you understand this unfathomable truth again and again, as if for the very first time.

Emily Wilson, an excerpt of her introduction to The Iliad