eva | writes poetry and the occasional prose
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Battlefields - Semi-hiatus - Tumblr Blog
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i think these go hand in hand <3
— “small kindnesses” by danusha laméris
— ross gay, from the book of delights
Our Experience of Grief is Unique as a Fingerprint
hi :) i love your blog so very much. i can’t sleep and im feeling horrifically anxious and i was wondering if you have any words that i can use to wrap myself around. anything that feels like being held ♡
Callista Buchen, “Taking Care”
Pat Schneider, “The Patience of Ordinary Things”
Kim Hye Rim
“Come, let’s stand by the window and look out / at the light on the field. / Let’s watch how / the clouds cover the the sun and almost nothing / stirs in the grass.”
Danusha Laméris, The Moons of August; “Thinking”
Heather Christle, “Then We Are in Agreement”
Holly Warburton
Ross Gay, from The Book of Delights
Jenny Slate, Little Weirds
Bernadette Mayer, from The Way to Keep Going in Antarctica
Ben McLaughlin, The Train
Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet
Joy Harjo, from “For Calling the Spirit Back from Wandering the Earth in Its Human Feet”
Adonis, from “Desire Moving Through Maps of Matter” (tr. Khaled Mattawa) / Valarie Kaur, See No Stranger: A Memoir and Manifesto of Revolutionary Love / Kahlil Gibran, from “On Joy and Sorrow” / Adonis, from “Desire Moving Through Maps of Matter” (tr. Khaled Mattawa) / Naomi Shihab Nye, from “Kindness”
Hello!!! I just found your blog and I love it so much!!! I love that you have such a wonderful library of poetry and literature 💕 poetry is the best way to connect our heart into concrete terms and can help us through the worst of it all. I love the whole feel of your blog!! You are a gift 💕 I’ve seen a few people ask for some poems, and if I may, I’d like to request for a few from your vast collection on how love never really dies. I recently went through a really peaceful break up and I’ve been trying to cope with that fact that I’m not angry at him and that I’m never not going to love him. I need some poetry for my aching heart. Thank you if you are able to, love! I hope you have a lovely day 💕
— John Berger, Will it be a Likeness? from The Shape of a Pocket
— John Cage to Merce Cunningham, June 29 1943
— Adonis, Selected Poems; “Beginnings of the Body, Ends of the Sea” (tr. Khaled Mattawa)
“But whatever, whenever, however this ends / I want you to know right now, / I love you forever.”
— Andrea Gibson, from The Madness Vase; “How It Ends”
— Mary Oliver, from “Mysteries, yes”
“someone I love is praying in another language / I don’t know all the words but I know / what it means—”
— Linnette Reeman, from “The New Jersey Devil Considers Parallels,” The New Jersey Devil Washes the Blood Off (and other vignettes) (L'Éphémère Review micro-chapbook, 2018)
— Nikki Giovanni, from an interview with Cynthia Adina Kirkwood for Los Angeles Times, Dec 4, 1985
— Aracelis Girmay, “I Am Not Ready To Die Yet”
friendship IS romance : 1. / 2. / 3. fleabag / 4. / 5. / 6. / 7. / 8. a little life, hanya yanagihara / 9. / 10.
early loves, a primer 💌
“In that book which is my memory, On the first page of the chapter that is the day when I first met you, Appear the words, ‘Here begins a new life’.”
— Dante Alighieri, La Vita Nouva
“When I first met you, that’s what I remember. I looked up at the sky and thought, I’m going to love this person because even the sky looks different.”
— Margaret Stohl, Beautiful Chaos
“We talked as if we had parted only the day before, as if we had known each other for many years.”
— Mikhail Bulgakov, The Master and Margarita
— The Beatles, “I Wanna Hold Your Hand”
“Just by existing and by letting me speak to you, you give me an immense amount. You are infinitely rich where I am concerned; entirely clear and captivating. I love you extremely and how it eases my heart to be able to say so.”
— Iris Murdoch, in a letter to Michael Oakeshott
“I feel met by you, he says afterwards. It’s weird. (That’s exactly what it feels like. I felt met by him the first time I saw him. I felt met by him all the times we weren’t even able to meet each other’s eyes.)”
— Ali Smith, Girl Meets Boy: The Myth of Iphis)
“How can I explain to you, my happiness, my golden, wonderful happiness, how much I am all yours–with all my memories, poems, outbursts, inner whirlwinds? Or explain that I cannot write a word without hearing how you will pronounce it–and can’t recall a single trifle I’ve lived through without regret–so sharp!–that we haven’t lived through it together–whether it’s the most, the most personal, intransmissable–or only some sunset or other at the bend of a road–you see what I mean, my happiness?”
— Vladimir Nabokov, letter to his wife Véra
— Benjamine Alire Saenz, Aristotle and dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe
“I cannot write about Damascus, without the jasmine climbing on my fingers. / I cannot say Her name, without my mouth getting overcrowded with apricot juice, blackberries and quince.”
— Nizar Qabbani, A Green Lantern on Damascus’ Door
“I had forgotten how much light there is in the world, till you gave it back to me.”
— Ursula K. Le Guin, A Wizard of Earthsea
“Yes, I need you, my fairy-tale. Because you are the only person I can talk with about the shade of a cloud, about the song of a thought–and about how, when I went out to work today and looked a tall sunflower in the face, it smiled at me with all of its seeds.”
— Vladimir Nabokov, letter to his wife Véra
— Lorde, “400 Lux”
“You know, when I start telling you something by saying, ‘I was thinking about what you said about … ,’ it always gives me pleasure to say that, to let you know that I was brooding on your words. And I think the pleasure is … well, I know how much I love it when you say ‘I was thinking about what you said about …’ It’s somehow as though the part of you that’s in me will be able to nourish the part of me that’s in you, or-something-I don’t know how to put it. But that there’s some circuit of reciprocity between these holding relations: your ability to hold me inside you, and mine to hold you inside me.”
— Eve Sedgwick, A Dialogue on Love
“There wasn’t anything mean about him. I don’t understand how you could live in a mean world and not have any of that meanness rub off on you. How could a guy live without some meanness?”
— Benjamine Alire Saenz, Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe
— Ali Smith, Girl Meets Boy: The Myth of Iphis
“Do you remember a night when I came along the dark passage to your room in a thunderstorm and we lay talking about whether we were afraid of death or not? That is the sort of occasion on which the things I want to say to you,–and to you only,–get said.”
— Virginia Woolf, in a letter to Vita Sackville-West
“Some people reflect light, some deflect it, you by some miracle, seem to collect it.”
— Mark Z. Danielewski, House of Leaves
“I saw her smile so close to my eyes that there was nothing but to see but the smile, and the thought came into my head that I’d never been inside a smile before, who’d have thought being inside a smile would be so ancient and so modern both at once?”
— Ali Smith, Girl Meets Boy: The Myth of Iphis
— Laura Marris, “Tell Me Gently”
“The thing is, Iphis and Ianthe had actually, for real, very really, fallen in love. Did their hearts hurt? I said. Did they feel like they were underwater all the time? Did they feel scoured by light? Did they wander about not knowing what to do with themselves? Yes, Robin said. All of that. And more.”
— Ali Smith, Girl Meets Boy: The Myth of Iphis
“You are all the colours in one, at full brightness.”
— Jennifer Niven, All the Bright Places
“Arwen: Do you remember when we first met? Aragorn: I thought I had wandered into a dream.”
— Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring
— Labi Siffre, “Bless the Telephone”
“This hour I tell things in confidence, / I might not tell everybody, but I will tell you.”
— Walt Whitman, “Song of Myself”
”When I am with you, there is nowhere else I’d rather be. And I am a person who always wants to be somewhere else.”
— David Levithan, How They Met, and Other Stories
“[Bridge:] But we’re both a long way from home We got the windows down, the radio’s on, always [Verse 2:] I wrote a letter to the sky saying maybe one day you’ll get to kiss me, kiss me, kiss me. My girl found it in the car and said baby why you trying to diss me, diss me, diss me? Cause you know you’re my baby, you know you’re my baby, ooh I’m not just in it for the pride, in it for the ride, yeah…”
— Frank Ocean, “Acura Integurl”
— Cat Power, “Sea of Love”
ross gay / antoine de saint-exupery / gilgamesh: a retelling by herbert mason
1. Clarice Lispector | 2. Egon Schiele | 3. Dylan Thomas | 4. Joseph Lorusso | 5. Jenny Slate | 6. Ron Hicks | 7. Mary Oliver | 8. Safet Zec | 9. Madeline Miller | 10. Antonio Piatti | 11. Ocean Vuong | 12. Peter Wever | 13. Richard Siken
Hi! I love your blog a lot. Would you have something about devotion, in a romantic way? Thank you so much!
“Bless one woman’s brows, her lips and their salt, bless the roundness of her shoulder. Her face, a lantern by which I live my life.”
— Ilya Kaminsky, “Envois”
“There was once a very great American surgeon named Halsted. He was married to a nurse. He loved her-immeasurably. One day Halsted noticed that his wife’s hands were chapped and red when she came back from surgery. And so he invented rubber gloves. For her. It is one of the great love stories in medicine. The difference between inspired medicine and uninspired medicine is love. When I met Ana I knew: I loved her to the point of invention.”
— Sarah Ruhl, The Clean House
— William Goldman, The Princess Bride
“I think of all the things he has been to me…Love. Lodestone. My true north. I turn always to him.”
— Stef Penney, The Tenderness of Wolves
“I am never away from you. Even now, I shall not leave you. In another world, I shall be still that one who loves you, loves you Beyond measure, beyond .”
— Edmond Rostand, “Cyrano de Bergerac”
“Even when I detach, I care. You can be separate from a thing and still care about it. If I wanted to detach completely, I would move my body away. I would stop the conversation midsentence. I would leave the bed. Instead, I hover over it for a second. I glance off in another direction. But I always glance back at you.”
— David Levithan, The Lover’s Dictionary
— Elisabeth Hewer, “Dove Hands”
"I will love you as we find ourselves farther and farther from one another, where once we were so close...I will love you until the chances of us running into one another slip from skim to zero, and until your face is fogged by distant memory...I will love you no matter what happens to you, and no matter how I discover what happens to you, and no matter what happens to me as I discover this...I will love you if you don’t marry me. I will love you if you marry someone else – your co-star, perhaps, or Y., or even O., or anyone Z. through A., even R. although sadly I believe it will be quite some time before two women can be allowed to marry – and I will love you if you have a child, and I will love you if you have two children, or three children, or even more, although I personally think three is plenty, and I will love you if you never marry at all, and never have children, and spend your years wishing you had married me after all, and I must say that on late, cold nights I prefer this scenario out of all the scenarios I have mentioned. That, Beatrice, is how I will love you even as the world goes on its wicked way.”
— Lemony Snicket, The Beatrice Letters
“I have been astonished that Men could die Martyrs for religion – I have shudder’d at it – I shudder no more – I could be martyr’d for my Religion – Love is my religion – I could die for that – I could die for you.”
— John Keats, letter to Fanny Brawne
— Margaret Atwood, “Corpse Song”
“I really like the idea of love as a violent act—not to the person that you love, but against the world. To say to somebody, ‘I love you; by extension, I hate all other things.”
— Hozier, from an interview
“Your voice comes out of an old world. That is not eloquence. It is the quickest way to express it. It is the only true world for me. An old world, and yet it is a world that has no existence except in you. — It is as if I were in the proverbial far country and never knew how much I had become estranged from the actual reality of the things that are the real things of my heart, until the actual reality found a voice — you are the voice.”
— Wallace Stevens, letter to Elsie Moll
“What am I, if not yours? / What do I do with my hands when they are just hands?”
— Olivia Gatwood, “The Lover as a Cult”
— Jeff Buckley, “Lover You Should Have Come Over”
“She’s kept her love for him as alive as the summer they first met. In order to do this, she’s turned life away. Sometimes she subsists for days on water and air. Being the only known complex life-form to do this, she should have a species named after her. Once Uncle Julian told me how the sculptor and painter Alberto Giacometti said that sometimes just to paint a head you have to give up the whole figure. To paint a leaf, you have to sacrifice the whole landscape. It might seem like you’re limiting yourself at first, but after a while you realize that having a quarter-of-an-inch of something you have a better chance of holding on to a certain feeling of the universe than if you pretended to be doing the whole sky. My mother did not choose a leaf or a head. She chose my father, and to hold on to a certain feeling, she sacrificed the world.”
— Nicole Krauss, The History of Love
“I walk around the cottage, touching things because you touched them. A book of Rilke. A plate that once had jelly on it. A hairbrush from which I have not yet removed the chestnut hairs. It’s a kind of sickness, isn’t it? An illness that has invaded me. Or rather the return of a chronic illness. This bout fatal, as I know it must be.I think that words corrupt and oxidize love. That it is better not to write of it. Even memory, I think, is full of rust and decay.I have always been faithful to you. If faithful means the experience against which everything else has been measured.”
— Anita Shreve, The Last Time They Met
— Twenty-One Pilots, “Tear in My Heart”
“Then you kissed me - I felt hot wax on my forehead. I wanted it to leave a mark: that’s how I knew I loved you. Because I wanted to be burned, stamped, to have something in the end.”
— Louise Glück, “Marathon”
“ ‘Love', this English word: like other English words it has tense. 'Loved' or 'will love' or 'have loved'. All these specific tenses mean Love is time-limited thing. Not infinite. It only exist in particular period of time. In Chinese, Love is '爱' (ai). It has no tense. No past and future. Love in Chinese means a being, a situation, a circumstance. Love is existence, holding past and future. If our love existed in Chinese tense, then it will last for ever. It will be infinite.”
— Xiaolu Guo, A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers
— Li-Young Lee, “This Room and Everything In It”
“And I believe I can do this in an ordinary kitchen with an ordinary woman and five eggs. The woman sets the table. She watches me beat the eggs. I scramble them in a saucepan, as my now-dead friend taught me; they stand deeper and cook softer, he said. I take our plated, spoon eggs on them, we sit and eat. She and I and the kitchen have become extraordinary: we are not simply eating; we are pausing in the march to perform an act together; we are in love; and the meal offered and received is a sacrament which says: I know you will die; I am sharing food with you; it is all I can do, and it is everything.”
— Andre Dubus, “On Charon’s Wharf”
“My youth / My youth is yours / Trippin' on skies, sippin' waterfalls / My youth / My youth is yours / Run away now and forevermore / My youth / My youth is yours / The truth so loud you can't ignore / My youth, my youth, my youth / My youth is yours”
— Troye Sivan, “Youth”
“There are other paintings of Hendrickje [by Rembrandt]. Before the Bathsheba in the Louvre, or the Woman Bathing in the National Gallery (London), I am wordless. Not because their genius inhibits me, but because the experience from which they derive and which they express—desire experiencing itself as something as old as the known world, tenderness experiencing itself as the end of the world, the eyes’ endless rediscovery, as if for the first time, of their love of a familiar body—all this comes before and goes beyond words. [...] In the painting of the Woman in Bed there is a complicity between the woman and the painter. This complicity includes both reticence and abandon, day and night. The curtain of the bed, which Hendrickje lifts up with her hand, marks the threshold between daytime and nighttime...She has not yet slept. Her gaze follows him as he approaches. In her face the two of them are reunited. Impossible now to separate the two images: his image of her in bed, as he remembers her: her image of him as she sees him approaching their bed.”
— John Berger, And Our Faces, My Heart, Brief as Photos
— Hozier, “Better Love”
THERE IS A LIGHT AND IT NEVER GOES OUT:
I. "I Still Don't Know Your Name" by Maria Eugenia Bravo, (August, 1991) translated by Dinah Livingstone | II. The Perks of Being a Wallflower (2012) dir. Stephen Chbosky | III. "Goodbye" by Bob Hicok | IV. La Femme Rousse (2015) by Julie Pieffer | V. "Thank You When I'm an Axe" from Bute: Poems by Emily Skaja | VI. Dare Alla Luce by Amy Friend | VI. "Anthem" from The Future (1992) by Leonard Cohen | VIII. Carol (2015) dir. Todd Haynes | IX. "Daguerreotype in Old Age" (1976) by Margaret Atwood | X. Egon Schiele | XI. Paris 9:21 pm (2015) by Leonardo Pucci | XII. Fruit of Life by Megan Reiker | XIII. Vincent Van Gogh
To love. To be loved. To never forget your own insignificance. To never get used to the unspeakable violence and the vulgar disparity of life around you. To seek joy in the saddest places. To pursue beauty to its lair. To never simplify what is complicated or complicate what is simple. To respect strength, never power. Above all, to watch. To try and understand. To never look away. And never, never, to forget.
Arundhati Roy
“Sometimes, when I’m careless, I think survival is easy: you just keep moving forward with what you have, or what’s left of what you were given, until something changes—or you realize, at last, that you can change without disappearing, that all you had to do was wait until the storm passes you over and you find that—yes—your name is still attached to a living being.”
— Ocean Vuong, from On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous
Some warm poetry, for cold evenings:
Molly Fisk, “Winter Sun” (We can make do with so little / just the hint of warmth, the slanted light.)
Pat Schneider, “The Patience of Ordinary Things” (It is a kind of love, is it not? / how the cup holds the tea.)
Barbara Ras, “Bite Every Sorrow” (You can speak a foreign language, sometimes / and it can mean something.)
Jack Gilbert, “Failing and Flying” (Everyone forgets that Icarus also flew.)
Lisel Mueller, “Things” (Even what was beyond us / was recast in our image; / we gave the country a heart, / the storm an eye)
Rabindranath Tagore, “On the Seashore” (The sea plays with children, and pale gleams the smile of the sea-beach / On the seashore of endless worlds children meet)
John O’Donohue, “Matins” (May I live this day / Compassionate of heart / Gentle in word / Courageous in thought)
Wallace Stevens, “The House Was Quiet and The World Was Calm” (The summer night is like a perfection of thought. / The house was quiet because it had to be)
Brian Patten, “Inessential Things” (Cats remember what is essential of days)
Emily Dickinson, “Simplicity” (How happy is the little stone / that rambles in the road, alone)
Yi Lu, “Valley’s Green” (flowers like tiny saucers — little bowls — little cups / filled to the brim with their own colors)
Jacques Prévert, “How to Paint a Bird’s Portrait” (When the bird comes / if it comes / observe the most profound silence)
Archibald MacLeish, “Eleven” (Happy as though he had no name, as though / He had been no one: like a leaf, a stem, / Like a root growing…)
Denise Levertov, “A Woman Alone” (Then / self-pity dries up, a joy / untainted by guilt lifts her. / She has fears, but not about loneliness)
Richard Brautigan, “Your Catfish Friend” (I’d love you and be your catfish / friend and drive such lonely / thoughts from your mind)
Linda Gregg, “The Letter” (I’m not feeling strong yet, but I am taking / good care of myself)
Andrew Lang, “Ballade of True Wisdom” (And I’d leave all the hurry, the noise, and the fray, / For a house full of books, and a garden of flowers)
Ada Limón, “The Raincoat” (my whole life I’ve been under her / raincoat thinking it was somehow a marvel / that I never got wet.)
Jorge Luis Borges, “The Just” (These people, unaware, are saving the world)
Wendell Berry, “The Peace of Wild Things” (I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.)
“If grief can be a doorway to love, then let us all weep for the world we are breaking apart so we can love it back to wholeness again.”
— Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants (2013, p. 359)
Hi do u know any poems on trauma?
hi, you could try looking through my tags #the great wound, #the body as a haunted house, or #la sonnambula which encompass trauma + trauma responses. you could also check out andrea gibson’s collection of poetry called the madness vase, mahtem shiferraw’s collection called your body is war, tara hardy’s my, my, my, my, my, ada limón’s bright dead things, tarfia faizullah’s seam, or alice notley’s in the pines. and finally a few poems below the cut:
“The violence we read about goes down. To trace some kinds I’ve known, I’d have to violate telling; because violence doesn’t always proceed directly from body to body. It flows from the heart to as far as the heart can’t see.”
alice notley, from in the pines; “the black trailer”
nikki giovanni, from “crutches”
tara hardy, “my, my, my, my, my”
h.d., from “envy”
marie howe, “magdalene: the addict”
mahtem shiferraw, your body is war; “your body is war (ii)”
ada limón, “before”
“What do I do with the loss I have? you ask. Now that I have survived, I have this.”
alice notley, from “in the pines”
Nikki Giovanni, from “Mirrors”
[Text ID: … but It Cannot Be A Mistake to have cared … It Cannot Be An Error to have tried … It Cannot Be Incorrect to have loved]
Ocean
I am in love with Ocean lifting her thousands of white hats in the chop of the storm, or lying smooth and blue, the loveliest bed in the world. In the personal life, there is
always grief more than enough, a heart-load for each of us on the dusty road. I suppose there is a reason for this, so I will be patient, acquiescent. But I will live nowhere except here, by Ocean, trusting equally in all the blast and welcome of her sorrowless, salt self.
“Poems are nearer to prayers than to stories, but in poetry there is no one behind the language being prayed to. It is the language itself which has to hear and acknowledge […] In all poetry words are a presence before they are a means of communication”
— John Berger, from And Our Faces, My Heart, Brief as Photos (Pantheon Books, 1984)(via soracities)