hi!! i followed you recently and i think i'm a little bit in love with your unfailingly kind and wondrous energy, reading what you have to say always makes me love the world a little bit more. i was wondering if you had any poetry recs about the sun??
you are so sweet, oh my stars! welcome, and i do so hope you continue your cultivation of loving the world around you! there’s so much here to love, so much that waits to really bloom until you look. this may be a gently meandering type of list – i have such a love love love for the sun in poetry and media, you’ve chosen one of my favourite topics! i adore how it always seems to come back to light, to warmth. i hope you enjoy my picks! ☀️
giovanni’s room, james baldwin – “and here my baby came indeed, through all that sunlight, his face flushed and his hair flying, his eyes, unbelievably, like morning stars.”
memory is sleeping, sanna wani – “where is the wind? in love, the wounds you tend. a wound, a door, a lake, a fence. whatever is perpendicular to your becoming. / someday, you will be in love again. the sun, a wound on your windowsill. light falls on your dreams. it sounds like someone knocking.“
in the country of resurrection, ada limón – “but that was last night. this morning the sun is coming alive in the kitchen. you’ve gone to get us gas station coffee and there is so much life all over the place.”
gps, shauna barbosa – “you kiss the back of my legs and i want to cry. only the sun has come this close, only the sun.”
there is a gold light in certain old paintings, donald justice – “there is a gold light in certain old paintings / that represents a diffusion of sunlight / it is like happiness, when we are happy / it comes from everywhere and nowhere at once, this light / the world is dusty, uncle. let us work.”
the first day without a mother, joy harjo – “i keep looking back. maybe i have turned to salt. it burns blue, like the spirits who have already started to call me home, up over the last earthy hill broken through with starts of blue flowers that heal the wounded heart. / i sit up in the dark drenched in longing. i am carrying over a thousand names for blue that i didn’t have at dusk.”
the crying book, heather christle – “and what shall we make ourselves from today? a memory, a seedling, a word? what can we hold up to the light and find despair has not yet touched?”
july notebook: the birds, robert hass – “sleep like the down elevator’s / imitation of a memory lapse. / then early light. / why were you born, voyager? / are you soaked in dreams, still? / is the light still touching everything?”
into the breach, ocean vuong – “you’re so quiet you’re almost tomorrow. / i want to leave no one behind. to keep & be kept. the way a field turns its secrets into peonies. the way light keeps its shadow by swallowing it.”
the brothers karamazov, fyodor dostoyevsky – “and i seem to have such strength in me now, that i think i could stand anything, any suffering, only to be able to say and to repeat to myself every moment, ‘i exist.’ in thousands of agonies - i exist. i’m tormented on the rack - but i exist! though i sit alone in a pillar - i exist! i see the sun, and if i don’t see the sun, i know it’s there. and there’s a whole life in that, in knowing that the sun is there.”
when the ghosts come ashore, jacqui germain – “you have survived so much that no one remembers. and you still spread warm rain on all your overgrown lots. and you still get dressed in the morning. you still open wide for the sun.”
extracting the stone of madness, alejandra pizarnik (tr. by yvette siegert) – “your bones ache on the brink of morning. you split open.”
when i am among the trees, mary oliver – “i am so distant from the hope of myself, in which i have goodness, and discernment, and never hurry through the world but walk slowly, and bow often. around me the trees stir in their leaves and call out, ‘stay awhile.’ the light flows from their branches. and they call again, ‘it's simple,’ they say, ‘and you too have come into the world to do this, to go easy, to be filled with light, and to shine.’”
i hope you get to stand alit and warm in a stream of sunlight soon, darling. i hope you get to keep some of it with you, tucked away in your pockets, for whenever you need a bit of starlight. 💛
