#poetry except

[words-and-coffee]

And yet, as they say, the heart is a leaf and the wind makes it throb.

Pablo Neruda, Then Come Back: The Lost Neruda Poems (Translated by Forrest Gander)

[mournfulroses]

Kōtarō Takamura, tr. by Hiroaki Sato, from Chieko & Other Poems; "The Snow Has Piled White,"

[calyptapis]

Mina Loy, "Parturition" from The Lost Lunar Baedeker

[words-and-coffee]

Settle your perfect hips here and the bow of wet arrows loosens into the night the petals that form your form let your clay limbs climb the silence and its pale ladder rung by rung taking off with me in my dream. I can sense you scaling the shade tree that sings to the shadows. Dark is the world’s night without you my love,

Pablo Neruda, Then Come Back: The Lost Neruda Poems (Translated by Forrest Gander)

[words-and-coffee]

you, my friend, could be the smoke’s daughter, you who may not have known you were born of fire and rage, lightning over flaming lava etched your violet mouth, your sex in the scorched oak’s moss like a ring in a nest, your fingers there in the flames, your compact body rose from leaves of fire that make me recall there were bakers in your family tree, you’re still the rainforest’s bread, ash from violent wheat,

Pablo Neruda, Then Come Back: The Lost Neruda Poems (Translated by Forrest Gander)

[words-and-coffee]

Dark is the world’s night without you my love,

Pablo Neruda, Then Come Back: The Lost Neruda Poems (Translated by Forrest Gander)

[words-and-coffee]

With kisses your mouth taught me my lips came to know fire.

Pablo Neruda, Then Come Back: The Lost Neruda Poems (Translated by Forrest Gander)

[words-and-coffee]

festooned with swan feathers and so half-cursed, the unhinged, breast-fed on literature, carrying every darkness in their hands, derelict and delirious, go trudging step by step, taking to the road

Pablo Neruda, Then Come Back: The Lost Neruda Poems (Translated by Forrest Gander)