Lúthien

Rilke: “The highest form of love is to be the protector of another person’s solitude.”

It never ceases to baffle me that we cannot agree as a species that war is terrible, and something we should only enter into with the heaviest of hearts and with absolutely no other options available.

It is an amputation of the soul, justified only when inaction would prove fatal to the host.

Dear humans, may all the beauty find you ❤️

"I feel frightened for a time that's lost its soul"

Folks, I'm telling you,
birthing is hard
and dying is mean—
so get yourself
a little loving
in between.

Langston Hughes
#poetry

I was on Twitter for the writers and the book recommendations, the essays, the poetry, the community. I am here now for the same. I’m a nerd. Please reply with a favorite recent essay or poem or story or book recommendation, and thank you.

Black-and-white photo of a leafless tree with thin branches. Snow covers the ground in the background. Two crows are perched on separate branches near the center, one slightly above the other.

Days of endless snow. “Not you, not I: the forgetting—”

What do I want? Peace. To love without fearing every minute that this love will bruise me.

Simone de Beauvoir, from a diary entry.

"Be regular and orderly in your life, so that you may be violent and original in your work." Gustave Flaubert

poets: …hear me out, though

We ran as if to meet the moon.

Robert Frost

Gospel: Rumi Every wound reveals its own repair. I smuggle myself until I tick. What / is love if not falconry? Tugging the humble out of something wild. A /woman takes her sorrow to the river and drowns it, pale feathers and / all. A woman explodes herself. There is no place where you cannot / sing: The needle in the doll. Gótico. Nashville. Vinalhaven where cicadas / warbled back and I folded my legs around you. And the girls are getting / sick. The tide doesn't mean to heed the moon. Some things we just do. / Like how I dreamt I left you. Light woke me up; I could still taste the / Mediterranean, a man's dirty mouth. Hunger enters me like another /night, the sky a good dark meat, grilled with stars. I want you in the / Pacific. The Rio Grande. I am borderland flooding. The dream where I / pull their bodies from the water, kiss them until they speak again. Swim.

“What / is love if not falconry? Tugging the humble out of something wild.”

Hala Alyan
#poetry

A Celanian night: the world is gone, I have to carry you.

NO ONE WAY WORKS, it will take all of us shoving at the thing from all sides to bring it down. Diane di Prima

Good morning, I am once again reminding you all that we are going to keep pushing and we are going to win:

"And this I believe: that the free, exploring mind of the individual human is the most valuable thing in the world. And this I would fight for: the freedom of the mind to take any direction it wishes, undirected."
- John Steinbeck

THOSE OTHERS We lived at the end of an empire. Sometimes we gathered in huge auditoriums and tried to understand. Our shame did not save us, nor our sadness redeem us, as we came to understand how others, far into the future, would look back at us, shaking their heads: we hoped in sorrow; more likely, anger.

“We lived at the end of an empire.”

Anne Carson, Decreation

Mary Oliver, photographed by her partner Molly Malone Cook. “Helping the traveler, 1965

Isn't it the moment of most profound doubt that gives birth to new certainties? Perhaps hopelessness is the very soil that nourishes human hope; perhaps one could never find sense in life without first experiencing absurdity.

Václav Havel

REVOLUTIONARY LETTER #96 POEM AT DAWN Empire is its own undoing Diane di Prima

Yes, it is.

Be Your Own Feral it’s a no-hands event. maps are optional. go ahead. wandering in the forest of ghost trees, getting lost among wraiths means nothing here. aren’t we all lost? visiting each other in our prisons. making up for lost time by losing more of it. getting lost may be the easiest way to stop and get some rest but it also may be that journey foretold by nobody but which we all take, with our cables wrapped around our wrists, our devices charged up, ready for anything we dearly hope. and here I am, trying to write it down.

Kyla Houbolt (@luaz.bsky.social), from Becoming Altar (@subpresspoetry.bsky.social)

Everything blue is made of distance

TO THE YOUNG WHO WANT TO DIE Sit down. Inhale. Exhale. The gun will wait. The lake will wait. The tall gall in the small seductive vial will wait will wait: will wait a week: will wait through April. You do not have to die this certain day. Death will abide, will pamper your postponement. I assure you death will wait. Death has a lot of time. Death can attend to you tomorrow. Or next week. Death is just down the street; is most obliging neighbor; can meet you any moment. You need not die today. Stay here-through pout or pain or peskyness. Stay here. See what the news is going to be tomorrow. Graves grow no green that you can use. Remember, green's your color. You are Spring.

This poem by Gwendolyn Brooks continues to be an anchor on hard days.

I owe my beating heart a debt for its endurance, its persistence, its // profound knowledge that is beyond any capacity to know its amplitude for taking / these detonations and insisting on living, on // beating . . .

Dionne Brand, Nomenclature for the Time Being

Louise Glück, Timor Mortis

Handwritten note that reads “filter the words through the lens of radical empathy and radical hope.”

We read Lorde’s ‘Poetry is not a Luxury’ and a student tasked me to “tell us what to DO with all this in 12 words or less.’

I think I did it.

Insha'Allah BY DANUSHA LAMÉRIS I don't know when it slipped into my speech that soft word meaning, "if God wills it." Insha' Allah I will see you next summer. The baby will come in spring, insha'Allah. Insha' Allah this year we will have enough rain. So many plans I've laid have unraveled easily as braids beneath my mother's quick fingers. Every language must have a word for this. A word our grandmothers uttered under their breath as they pinned the whites, soaked in lemon, hung them to dry in the sun, or peeled potatoes, dropping the discarded skins into a bowl. Our sons will return next month, insha'Allah. Insha'Allah this war will end, soon. Insha'Allah the rice will be enough to last through winter. How lightly we learn to hold hope, as if it were an animal that could turn around and bite your hand. And still we carry it the way a mother would, carefully, from one day to the next.

This poem.
by Ellen Bass

The Want of Peace All goes back to the earth, / and so I do not desire / pride of excess or power, / but the contentments made / by men who have had little: / the fisherman's silence / receiving the river's grace, / the gardner's musing on rows. // I lack the peace of simple things. / I am never wholly in place. / I find no peace or grace. / We sell the world to buy fire, / our way lighted by burning men, / and that has bent my mind / and made me think of darkness / and wish for the dumb life of roots.

“We sell the world to buy fire, / our way lighted by burning men, / and that has bent my mind / and made me think of darkness / and wish for the dumb life of roots.”

Wendell Berry
#poetry