whisper words

anne/xxiv/aspiring writer (main @merflk)

[feral-ballad]

Silence had entered me. It was like the night, and my memories—they were like stars

Louise Glück, from Faithful and Virtuous Night; “Midnight”

[peoniepoetals]

One called her proud, / cross-grained, uncivil;

Christina Rossetti, from “Goblin Market” in Poems of Christina Rossetti

[flowerytale]

Margaret Atwood, from “Owl And Pussycat, Some Years Later”, The Door

[typewriter-worries]

[ Text ID: Anything can become a saint / if you pray to it enough ]

[memoryslandscape-deactivated202]

The hay in the loft misses the night sky, so the old roof leaks a few stars.

Jim Harrison, from “Braided Creek,” Complete Poems (Copper Canyon Press, 2021)

[memoryslandscape-deactivated202]

It was a long time before he could listen to music or read a book she’d loved, before he could stand by the window and wonder aloud, as if she were there to answer, what kind of bird was at the feeder just then, all brightness and motion before it was gone.

James Scruton, “After,” Southern Poetry Review (vol. 60, no. 1, 2023)

[derangedrhythms]

I condemn you. Yet my heart yearns towards you. I would go with you through the fires of death. Yet am happiest alone.

Virginia Woolf, from ‘The Waves’

[dk-thrive]

The doctor said my prognosis is good. My heart is strong, and usually it plays its song just fine, but sometimes it skips like a scratched record. An “electrical” issue, nothing dangerous, he said. My trigger is stress, so my treatment is perspective.

— Maggie Smith, from "About the Body" in “You Could Make this Place Beautiful: A Memoir” (Atria/One Signal Publishers; April 11, 2023) (via Last Tambourine)

[derangedrhythms]

Break your image and wrench it from me. 

Sylvia Plath, The Letters of Sylvia Plath Volume I: 1940–1956 ⁠— Richard Sassoon, 1st March 1956

[czesca]

characters who are so inauthentic. characters who only show what they want other people to see of them. characters who simply must have control over every part of themselves. do you even get it

[antigonick]

For years, the habit of wanting you, carried like something unnoticed, lint in a pocket, or manzanita seed waiting a fire—

Jane Hirshfield, excerpt of “Desire”, in Of Gravity Angels (via antigonick)

[lifeinpoetry]

In all ways, I was right. With certainty, I would go on living. And when I woke, I still believed in you. In my desire.

— Ryann Stevenson, from “BIOLOGICAL CLOCK,” Human Resources

[lifeinpoetry]

We will drown beneath the blue     curve of history anyway

and it won’t matter, the petals you pinned to my dress—

   my consolation            this city’s fragrant death

— Jennifer Elise Foerster, from “The Floating World,” Bright Raft in the Afterweather

[lifeinpoetry]

Believe where I am sending you. I have been shoveling upside

down. And now my eyes stagger, my hands ache, my legs becoming hunter,

my back a raging shadow. I have been gardening myself into this remembrance.

— Mai Der Vang, from “Guide for the Channeling,” Yellow Rain

[lifeinpoetry]

All right, then, annihilate me; that other self was a fiction anyhow.

—

Sarah Ruhl, from “On interruptions,” 100 Essays I Don’t Have Time to Write

(via lifeinpoetry)

[adrasteiax]

(…) memories drift & nod like belladonna kissing the ground.

Yusef Komunyakaa, from The Thorn Merchant’s Wife in “Neon Vernacular: New And Selected Poems”  (via adrasteiax)

[peoniepoetals]

Through all the bright hours I cling to expectation, until darkness comes to reclaim me as its own.

Maya Angelou, in “A Plagued Journey” from Shaker, Why Don't You Sing?

[adrasteiax]

Each heart has its haunted chamber, Where the silent moonlight falls!

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, from The Haunted Chamber in “Poems Bewitched And Haunted” (via adrasteiax)