3 days ago · 150 notes · Source · Reblogged from apoetreflects
And in the long run, they were both right.
1 month ago · 1,735 notes · Source · Reblogged from thebookishdark
I was satisfied with haiku until I met you,
but now I want a Russian novel,
a 50-page description of you sleeping.— D. Young
2 months ago · 9,025 notes · Source · Reblogged from elcee
It is a season
of divorce.
February ends
abruptly.
Oak trees which have fiercely
held to their leaves
all winter
suddenly
let go.
Our friends
tear apart.
We married so young.
I think of pictures
of Asian princes
betrothed at five,
their enormous eyes
accepting anything.
In the woods
dogs nose among emptied burrows,
bark at the silence.
Don’t leave now.
We have almost
survived
our lives.
2 months ago · 8 notes · Source · Reblogged from whenwetalkaboutlove
Touching your goodness, I am like a man
Who turns a letter over in his hand
And you might think that this was because the hand
Was unfamiliar but, truth is, the man
Has never had a letter from anyone;
And now he is both afraid of what it means
And ashamed because he has no other means
To find out what it says than to ask someone.
His uncle could have left the farm to him,
Or his parents died before he sent them word,
Or the dark girl changed and want him for beloved.
Afraid and letter-proud, he keeps it with him.
What would you call his feeling for the words
that keep him rich and orphaned and beloved?
3 months ago · 2 notes
In love, his grammar grew
rich with intensifiers, and adverbs fell
madly from the sky like pheasants
for the peasantry, and he, as stated
as they were, lolled under shade trees
until roused by moonlight
and the beautiful fraternal twins
and and but. Oh that was when
he knew he couldn’t resist
a conjunction of any kind.
One said accumulate, the other
was a doubter who loved the wind
and the mind that cleans up after it.
For love
he wanted to break all the rules,
light a candle behind a sentence
named Sheila, always running on
and wishing to be stopped
by the hard button of a period.
Sometimes, in desperation, he’d look
toward a mannequin or a window dresser
with a penchant for parsing.
But mostly he wanted you, Sheila,
and the adjectives that could precede
and change you: bluesy, fly-by-night,
queen of all that is and might be.
3 months ago · 3 notes
simplicity
say sleep
or
shall we
shower
have an apple
you are
as I need
water
shall I move?
do you dream?
shallow snow
flesh
melt this
3 months ago · 0 notes
4 months ago · 14 notes
The Lover Pleads With His Friend for Old Friends
W.B. Yeats
Though you are in your shining days,
Voices among the crowd
And new friends busy with your praise,
Be not unkind or proud,
But think about old friends the most:
Time’s bitter flood will rise,
Your beauty perish and be lost
For all eyes but these eyes.
6 months ago · 2 notes
He Gives His Beloved Certain Rhymes
W.B. Yeats
Fasten your hair with a golden pin,
And bind up every wandering tress;
I bade my heart build these poor rhymes:
It worked at them, day out, day in,
Building a sorrowful loveliness
Out of the battles of old times.
You need but lift a pearl-pale hand,
And bind up your long hair and sigh;
And all men’s hearts must burn and beat;
And candle-like foam on the dim sand,
And stars climbing the dew-dropping sky,
Live but to light your passing feet.
6 months ago · Notes
A Dream of Death
W.B. Yeats
I dreamed that one had died in a strange place
Near no accustomed hand,
And they had nailed the boards above her face,
The peasants of that land,
Wondering to lay her in that solitude,
And raised above her mound
A cross they had made out of two bits of wood,
And planted cypress round;
And left her to the indifferent stars above
Until I carved these words:
She was more beautiful than thy first love,
But now lies under boards.
6 months ago · 3 notes
When You Are Old
William Butler Yeats
When you are old and grey and full of sleep,
And nodding by the fire, take down this book,
And slowly read, and dream of the soft look
Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep;
How many loved your moments of glad grace,
And loved your beauty with love false or true,
But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you,
And loved the sorrows of your changing face;
And bending down beside the glowing bars,
Murmur, a little sadly, how Love fled
And paced upon the mountains overhead
And hid his face amid a crowd of stars.
6 months ago · 4 notes
In the wave-strike over unquiet stones
By Pablo Neruda
the brightness bursts and bears the rose
and the ring of water contracts to a cluster
to one drop of azure brine that falls.
O magnolia radiance breaking in spume,
magnetic voyager whose death flowers
and returns, eternal, to being and nothingness:
shattered brine, dazzling leap of the ocean.
Merged, you and I, my love, seal the silence
while the sea destroys its continual forms,
collapses its turrets of wildness and whiteness,
because in the weft of those unseen garments
of headlong water, and perpetual sand,
we bear the sole, relentless tenderness.
6 months ago · 5 notes
7 months ago · 119 notes · Source · Reblogged from wordpainting
