beauty in words

[thegirlshewas7]

grief

when people speak of grief they are not grieving

because when your heart and mind have been hammered to dust there are no words

there are, maybe your eyes, able to look left towards the window

or your breath maybe able to feel yourself breathe deeply, then sigh

there are so many tears

there is sitting in chairs for hours that turn to days that turn to nothingness

there is no hunger

only hollow only empty only howling between gasping between weeping

there are no showers or soap no aromas in the air no candles burning nostalgically

if there is fire you can only see ash there are no colors except black no moods, just numb.

in your bed. there is no sleep.

wounded is too light, sadness is too smug. shame and guilt are your home devastation composes your  roof, walls. floors.

grief does not speak it screams as it quietly breaks you.

[thegirlshewas7]

[thegirlshewas7]

my beauty.

i lift myself that morning, i know i have to.

my girl is so beautiful in the photo. who knows grieving?

i glance her, and there is only beauty her shy expression that is mommy’s oh, but my love, you are mine.

i grew you we lived together your little fists and knees jutted from you, upon chocolate omelettes bacon. my darling, how you loved bacon.

i never knew the meaning of Crave. until you. after 2 bowls of cereal you said, mommy. more.

so we did. i didn’t know you then my beautiful precious my princess.

Ah, but how i see you now. so much perfection and love. Your stubborn nature as your daddy just as you accommodate the sensitivity of your mommy.

I wish i knew, Sarah Jane. I didn/t. I wish i knew it was you growing inside me. I didn’t.

You were. You are. so perfect. May God never interrupt your beauty with a question.

you are my church and my saint and my saviour, beautiful one.

I would understand you even if all i had were questions objecting.

I would. and I will love you ever so gently in that place, corner, reality.

It was a crime scene my beauty.

They stole you from me. my beautiful perfect girl my beautiful baby made of butterfly wings.

I love you as sea shells rage towards the shore. I didn’t protect you, my beauty.

I failed.

and we’re together, today, where i tell you of my sorrow and your beauty and your magnificent eyes

that speak only of omnipotence.

[celtos]

rainer maria rilke, the book of hours

[daughterearth]

What Mary Oliver, Sylvia Plath is to some people, Rilke is to me.

[brok3np4radise-deactivated20250]

You cannot make everyone think and feel as deeply as you do. This is your tragedy … because you understand them, and they do not understand you.

Daniel Saint

[feral-ballad]

Every leaf that falls never stops falling. I once thought that leaves were leaves. Now I think they are feeling, in search of a place— someone’s hair, a park bench, a finger. Isn’t that like us, going from place to place, looking to be alive?

Victoria Chang, from The Trees Witness Everything; “Passage”

[yuu-nim]

"You, already lost from the start, beloved, who never arrived, I don't know what sounds you adore. I no longer try, when the future swells up, to recognize you. All the immense images in me: landscapes experienced at a distance, cities and towers and bridges and un- expected turns in our paths, and the powerful countries once suffused with the Gods, rise up within me to mean you, who eludes me. You are the gardens, alas, I gazed at with such unbridled hope. A window left open in a country house—and you almost stepped, pensively, toward me. I discovered alleys,— you had just walked them, and sometimes the mirrors in stores were still dizzy with you and returned, startled, my too sudden image.—Who knows, whether the same bird did not call through both of us, separately last night?"

–Rainer Maria Rilke, Rilke on Love

[robertjw4688]

I spent enough time

buried beneath the

blizzard of their

apathy

that my bones

began to wither.

Now, I rip

spring from its

crawling clock and

plant it in a

vein once untouched by

the beauty of mirrors.

I reach for

me, I

touch

and shiver

like God in wheat.

Robert J. W. (10-28-23)

[robertjw4688]

Old paranoias crust to

stale ramblings off

their vine.

I spin

in a reverie of

raindrops the size of

those I was blessed to

leave alone.

I'm better

everyday, the toll of

authenticity a

distant price

drying

in my lacrimal gold.

Robert J. W. (10-27-23)

[many-sparrows]

"I find you there in all these things I care for like a brother. A seed, you nestle in the smallest of them, and in the huge ones spread yourself hugely. Such is the amazing play of the powers: they give themselves so willingly, swelling in the roots, thinning as the trunks rise, and in the high leaves, resurrection"

— Ranier Marie Rilke, The Book of Monastic Life poem 22, from The Book of Hours

[yuu-nim]

"You, already lost from the start, beloved, who never arrived, I don't know what sounds you adore. I no longer try, when the future swells up, to recognize you. All the immense images in me: landscapes experienced at a distance, cities and towers and bridges and un- expected turns in our paths, and the powerful countries once suffused with the Gods, rise up within me to mean you, who eludes me. You are the gardens, alas, I gazed at with such unbridled hope. A window left open in a country house—and you almost stepped, pensively, toward me. I discovered alleys,— you had just walked them, and sometimes the mirrors in stores were still dizzy with you and returned, startled, my too sudden image.—Who knows, whether the same bird did not call through both of us, separately last night?"

–Rainer Maria Rilke, Rilke on Love

[feral-ballad]

To have a heart like this / is to be made of midnight. / I have been waiting for this heart to fade or at least to kneel. The heart is not inside us but we are inside it.

Victoria Chang, from The Trees Witness Everything; “Marfa, Texas”

[feral-ballad]

Every leaf that falls never stops falling. I once thought that leaves were leaves. Now I think they are feeling, in search of a place— someone’s hair, a park bench, a finger. Isn’t that like us, going from place to place, looking to be alive?

Victoria Chang, from The Trees Witness Everything; “Passage”

[derangedrhythms]

Anne Sexton sometimes seemed like a woman without skin. She felt everything so intensely, had so little capacity to filter out pain that everyday events often seemed unbearable to her. Paradoxically it is also that skinlessness which makes a poet. One must have the gift of language, of course, but even a great gift is useless without the other curse: the eyes that see so sharply they often want to close. 

Erica Jong, from ‘Remembering Anne Sexton’

[stay-close]

“You make me feel that the world is not strange.”

— Anne Sexton

[words-and-coffee]

“The words boil out of me, coil after coil of sinuous possibility. The cosmos unravels from my mouth, all fullness, all vacancy.”

—

Margaret Atwood, Morning in the Burned House: Half-Hanged Mary