Sarah Rosangela @thehighartofmakingtoast - Tumblr Blog

petitworld

Paradise, Washington, USA by David Irons Jr

marljin

petaltexturedskies

Juan Ramón Jiménez, tr by Robert Bly, from "Nocturne" wr. c. 1903

english-idylls

Charlotte Brontë’s description of her sister Emily from ‘The Editor’s Preface to the new edition of Wuthering Heights’.

inmyopinion-jpg

papayajuan2019

will you just let me be silly for a sec. there's this dread so ancient in me

Litany

BY TOM SLEIGH

It isn't camels and sheep and an underground house

or an abandoned oasis, the shaded grass littered with fallen dates.

It isn't tankers lined up on the horizon,

or sand dunes asking nothing and giving nothing as they creep.

It isn't the sculpture of a golden fist crushing a fighter jet,

or graffiti shouting Death or Freedom.

It's the way vodka in the house of the imam

can be hidden in a plastic water bottle.

It's Ashur's unpublished papers on prostrate cancer,

the patient with the catheter released from the hospital

for just one night who goes home to his wife

and they figure out a way to make love.

It's what the German doctor whose name means "joy"

meant by the psychopathology of nations.

It's the joke about bullets being fired off into the air

because the air makes such a good target not even a blind man can miss.

It's not the houses burned, the young men shot or kidnapped,

it's not the anti-aircraft guns positioned where your house was.

It's what no one will say about what no one else will say.

It's what anyone who knows what they shouldn't say knows.

It's what the Revolution whispers about one war everywhere

in the ear of a drone watching a camel

rippling through heatwaves on a screen.

#poetry

Snow

BY LOUIS MACNEICE

The room was suddenly rich and the great bay-window was

Spawning snow and pink roses against it

Soundlessly collateral and incompatible:

World is suddener than we fancy it.

World is crazier and more of it than we think,

Incorrigibly plural. I peel and portion

A tangerine and spit the pips and feel

The drunkenness of things being various.

And the fire flames with a bubbling sound for world

Is more spiteful and gay than one supposes—

On the tongue on the eyes on the ears in the palms of one's hands—

There is more than glass between the snow and the huge roses.

#poetry

A Cigarette

BY ILYA KAMINSKY

Watch —

Vasenka citizens do not know they are evidence of happiness

in a time of war,

each is a ripped-out document of laughter.

God,

deaf have something to tell

that not even they can hear —

you will find me, God,

like a dumb pigeon’s beak I am

pecking

every way at astonishment.

If you

climb a roof in the Central Square of a bombarded city, you will see my people and me —

one neighbor thieves a cigarette

another gives a dog

a pint of sunlit beer.

The sting of the finite, by PETER GRANDBOIS

“I do not know [but] that the devil goes about in my likeness to do any hurt."—Sarah Osborne (1643-1692)

You do not have to be haunted

to forget your boots before

running through television snow,

or become a door blown open

by wind, or shove the ones you love

over the bannister and down

the spiral staircase at midnight.

You do not have to be dead

to summon friends by false names,

luring them to unsound bridges,

or call crows to weave pieces

of another life into nests

of regret that rest gently

on their unsteady heads.

The seasons where we are lost,

trapped deep in the forest

of ourselves while the moon sharpens

its edges, bear counting.

Don’t rely on lessons learned from frost

that beards the trees in winter,

like a veil over the face of God.

This body is your own.

“I ask you neither for health nor for sickness, for life nor for death; but that you may dispose of my health and my sickness, my life and my death, for your glory ... You alone know what is expedient for me; you are the sovereign master, do with me according to your will. Give to me, or take away from me, only conform my will to yours. I know but one thing, Lord, that it is good to follow you, and bad to offend you. Apart from that, I know not what is good or bad in anything. I know not which is most profitable to me, health or sickness, wealth or poverty, nor anything else in the world. That discernment is beyond the power of men or angels, and is hidden among the secrets of your providence, which I adore, but do not seek to fathom.”

Blaise Pascal

#poetry