[firstfullmoon]

Will you turn your palms to the sky? Will you turn your palms to the prayer hunger makes? Will you feed and feed, and lick the bowl clean when we’re both full?

— Franny Choi, from “Perihelion: A History of Touch”

You have no idea what kind of light you’ll let in when you drop the bowl, no idea what will make you full

— Maggie Nelson, from “The Canal Diaries”

God created us with absence in our hands, but we will not return that way. Not now, when we are both so capable of growing full

— Natalie Diaz, from “I Lean Out the Window and She Nods Off in Bed, the Needle Gently Rocking on the Bedside Table”

Love and love and more love: ever green,

Warm, belly-full; cool, satiated, a wilding of grin, romp and ballad.

— Leah Umansky, from “Edge of the Wild”

[cocainejuul]

[soracities]

Czesław Miłosz, from “I Sleep A Lot” (tr. Czesław Miłosz ), New and Collected Poems: 1931-2001

[Text ID: “I have read many books but I don’t believe them. When it hurts we return to the banks of certain rivers.”]

[soracities]

Fady Joudah, from "Venus Cycle", part of 16 Love Poems by Writer's of Palestinian Heritage, pub. AAWW

[idleminds]

[wheatfalls]

“…people like Jesus and Paul were not executed for saying, “Love one another.” They were killed because their understanding of love meant more than being compassionate towards individuals, although it did include that. It also meant standing against the domination systems that rule their world, and collaborating with the Spirit in the creation of a new way of life that stood in contrast to the normalcy of the wisdom of this world. Love and justice go together. Justice without love can be brutal and love without justice can be banal. Love is the heart of justice and justice is the social form of love.”

— Marcus J. Borg and John Dominic Crossan, The First Paul: Reclaiming the Radical Visionary Behind the Church’s Conservative Icon (p.205)

[pairedaeza]

Salt glimmers on the lover’s body. Lingers. 

Etel Adnan, from Sea and Fog

[soracities]

Adonis, ‘Transformations of the Lover’, The Pages of Day and Night (trans. Samuel Hazo)

[soracities]

“The idolatry of the self and the desecration of the self and the dissipation of the self…”

— Octavio Paz, from ‘Proem’, A Tree Within (trans. Eliot Weinberger)

[victoriajoan]

“‘I will love You forever,’ swears the poet. I find this easy to swear too. I will love you at 4:15 P.M. next Tuesday: is that still as easy?”

— W.H. Auden, from Collected Poems

[soracities]

“no words do not make love they make absence if i said water would i drink? if i said bread would i eat?”

— Alejandra Pizarnik, from ‘On this Night, In this World’, Extracting the Stone of Madness: Poems 1962-1972 (trans. Yvette Siegert)

[soracities]

Rumi, from Love: The Joy That Wounds - The Love Poems of Rumi (trans. from Persian to French by Mahin and Nahal Tajadad and Jean-Louis Carriere; trans. from French to English by Elfreda Powell)

[Text ID: “For without you, I swear, the town Has become like a prison to me. Distraction and the mountain And the desert, all I desire.” ]

[pityroad]

— Forfeiting My Mystique, Kaveh Akbar, in '100 Queer Poems, an anthology' (2022)

[text ID: Some saints spent their whole childhoods biting their teachers' hands and / sprinkling salt into spider-webs, only to be redeemed by a fluke shock of grace just before death. May I feather into such a swan soon.]

[geryone]

Eating the Archive, Yousif M. Qasmiyeh

[havingapoemwithyou]

my grandfather and home by Mosab Abu Toha

[sawasawako]

“Reporting and posting about what’s happening in Gaza, Palestine feels pointless,” Plestia writes on day 37, having regained access to her account after two days without it. “It feels like I’m posting movie scenes for people to watch, and whenever they get bored they watch something else.” It’s a good point, one that instills shame. At what stage do we become voyeurs? Are people just watching and not witnessing? To watch is to consume; to witness is to acknowledge, to bestow some degree of legitimacy. But what does it do to see it? Is empathy ever enough? “Compassion is an unstable emotion,” Susan Sontag wrote. “It needs to be translated into action, or it withers.” Earlier, I went to share a post and stopped myself. I thought of Motaz’s apology, his shame at filming Gazans in their worst moments. Will a picture of a girl who has lost 60 family members and the use of her legs inspire only empathy? Will it change anything, or will the bombing just continue, the number of orphans and murdered doctors keep rising?

– Zaina Arafat, Witnessing Gaza Through Instagram

[drumlincountry]

I was at a Palestinian solidarity gig last night & the one Palestinian artist who was going to perform had COVID so the organisers asked around to see if there were any Palestinians who'd like to say a few words instead.

A local guy who was born & raised in Gaza offered to speak. He started with "I'm an engineer. i'm not a poet or a politician. I don't... do public speaking… I had no idea what to say when I came up here. So i'm just going to tell you about the street I grew up on."

And then he did! He went down the street building by building. He told us about the ice cream shop on the corner, the grocery shop, the charity that supports people with intellectual disabilities. He told us about the people who he knew growing up, the families who still live in the different houses. He told us about the university buildings and about his friends who quit being accountants to start a band together. All on that street.

All of which is gone now, by the way. Bombed to dust.