go as a river

[softkyber]

If I could be happy and know the truth of it, the way you can’t mistake the taste of blood, or the smell of smoke curling from an unseen wreckage

If I could trace the certainty of you the way foxes scent prey hiding deep beneath the snow

Wouldn’t I know to hold on to that good thing?

Wouldn’t I know to sink my teeth in until they met bone?

[buckys]

Aftersun (2022) dir. Charlotte Wells

[softkyber]

It's a rare gift, to know where you need to be, before you've been to all the places you don't need to be.

— Ursula K. Le Guin, from "Tales from Earthsea"

[urgetocreate]

Jia Li (Chinese, b.1964), Summer Light, 2015, Watercolor on paper

[thoughtkick]

“It has been said, ‘time heals all wounds.’ I do not agree. The wounds remain. In time, the mind, protecting its sanity, covers them with scar tissue and the pain lessens. But it is never gone.”

— Rose Kennedy

[softkyber]

To say that time heals all wounds is the biggest lie. That grief never disappears. We somehow learn to grow around the edges.

[softkyber]

above the hood of this

beetle of a car, the sky

carries itself lightly. hugely. blue. i

don’t know where we’re going. i don’t think you do,

either, with your fine

ears like the ends of mustaches and your

eyes, round and dark and as slow to

fall as the night. i don’t know where we’re

going but i don’t think it’s there. we can’t

grieve yet because we don’t know what for. because we

       don’t know

how it even began;

how to even begin. the desert here could be enough,

i think, for us. if we could

just tilt the wheel a bit too far right, to

knife through the barriers

like the rain, when it comes. i can’t stay here.

my legs ache from disuse and i keep

nudging the early sky but it won’t wake. there,

over the ridge somewhere, could be a herd, a

place for us to go. for the taste of air beyond this

quiet, far from this soft rush of

rubber on the morning. you could

start with your hooves in the sands and

the sun on your coat, light

unfiltered by the windows of this dark

van. i could start without sunscreen, with

waves of heat that hold me like a womb.

we can start here, if you want. there is no numbered-

        lettered

exit. there is no too late, no number of

years. there is only now, and the wheel, and the

yell that is pounding hooves, and the hot

zenith of living,

                      so free it hurts.

Claire Beeli, "Abecedarian for the Horses in a Trailer on Route 66"

source: rattle

[weltenwellen]

Chen Chen, Your Emergency Contact Has Experienced an Emergency

[softkyber]

At what point is it ok to say 'I have had enough' and it's not called 'giving up'?

Why does it matter what it's called?

Staying the course is only a virtue if you're sticking with something that you value and worth sticking with.

Quitting is only courageous if you're opting out of something you loathe that makes you a worse version of yourself.

Will you be more of the person you want to be if you stick with it through the challenges? Then stick.

Will you move closer to who you want to be if you exit? Then exit.

you get to tell your story, take ownership of it

[softkyber]

"Follow your inner moonlight; don't hide the madness."

— Allen Ginsberg

[softkyber]

I want to hear the tears in your voice, which means I fell in love. I want to hear the soccer balls left in the back of the net, the favourite barrette that exists in photos, the truth. If you have a train roaring up your throat like a tunnel travelling through another tunnel, honk the horn. When I'm quiet, in my room of loneliness, it rains from the earth up through my dirty socks, into all my travels. I want to hear the tears in everything you eat, each door you open like a waking up, running from this world to the next like a whole trail of ants, never looking up. For one moment: quit being sad. I heard we are all made of water. Be proud to be made of water.

[softkyber]

In sleep I am looking for poems in the shape of open V's of birds flying in formation, or open arms saying, I forgive you, all.

— Elizabeth Alexander

[softkyber]

Rain is falling falling and memories keep flooding by they show me a senseless world a voracious world—abyss ambush whirlwind spur but I keep loving it because I do because of my five senses because of my amazement because every morning, because forever, I have loved it without knowing why.

Claribel Alegría, from “Rain”, trans. Margaret S. Peden

[xshayarsha]

“Poems are nearer to prayers than to stories, but in poetry there is no one behind the language being prayed to. It is the language itself which has to hear and acknowledge. For the religious poet, the Word is the first attribute of God. In all poetry words are a presence before they are a means of communication.”

— John Berger, My Heart, Brief as Photos.

[honeyandelixir]

Take me, wherever you are, Take me, however you are. To be restored to the warmth of face and body, To the light of heart and eye, To the salt of bread and song, To the taste of earth and homeland.

Mahmoud Darwish

[softkyber]

Some dreams we lose, some never change. We all know this unnamed yearning, standing in front of doors we have yet to open and those we have closed long ago. Pieces of us remain in this silent space, whilst the surrounding world grows beneath our reach. One day I hope to look back with kindness

[gorgonwoman]

Whose version of Mary am I holding?, Mary Szybist

[artemisiasea]

“To make a new world you start with an old one, certainly. To find a world, maybe you have to have lost one. Maybe you have to be lost. The dance of renewal, the dance that made the world, was always danced here at the edge of things, on the brink, on the foggy coast.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin, Dancing at the Edge of the World: Thoughts on Words, Women, Places