T: Poetry - Tumblr Posts
I don’t know if you ever let someone down, got your ass kicked, or straight up failed. Those are the moments that define us, they push you further than you ever thought possible and force you to make choices… no matter what the cost.
Cole McGrath, inFAMOUS (via embvrs)
Edward Hopper, Nighthawks (1942) / Richard Siken, Litany in Which Certain Things Are Crossed Out (2005)
Could you please write something about forgiving oneself even if it's hard? About forgiving yourself even though you know for a fact that you don't deserve it?
i stood at the canyon’s edge, all my mistakes / clenched in my trembling hands. i did not / throw them down into the scarlet, heat-blistered / dust. i lifted them to my mouth / & swallowed them whole. i turned / away to the horizon, as violet & sharp / as a fresh wound, & i pushed myself forward, / knowing soon, from out of this / darkness, stars will rise, blue-winged, to guide me.
Mary Oliver, "I don’t want to live a small life" from Red Bird
Mary Oliver, "On Thy Wondrous Works I Will Meditate" from Devotions
a compilation on memory, part two (part one here)
—can’t stop returning to this scene of leaving, / can’t stop pausing this scene, thinking I’ve left something out again,
Chen Chen, from When I Grow Up I Want to Be a List of Further Possibilities; “Poem in Noisy Mouthfuls”
Mary Ruefle, “Deconstruction”
(…) no one wants a half-remembered tragedy. You must know the width of the knife and how it ruined you, name the organs it kissed.
Olivia Gatwood, Life of the Party, ‘Addendum II to No Baptism’
—so here we are again, one handedly fingering / the puckered edges of the exit wounds / memory leaves behind,
Carl Phillips, from Wild is the Wind: Poems; “Givingly”
You see, I take the parts that I remember and stitch them back together / to make a creature that will do what I say / or love me back.
Richard Siken, from Crush
Naomi Shihab Nye, from “The Tent”
But perhaps it is a way of understanding the unthinkable. If a story haunts us, we keep telling it to ourselves, replaying it in silence while we shower, while we walk down streets, or in our moments of insomnia.
Valeria Luiselli, Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay in Forty Questions
Lidia Yuknavitch, The Chronology of Water: A Memoir
…memory is an act of imagination, you never tell the same story twice, not even to yourself.
Michael Burkard, as featured in Mary Ruefle’s On Imagination
Valeria Luiselli, Faces in the Crowd (tr. Christina MacSweeney)
I told my version – faithful and invented, accurate and misremembered, shuffled in time.
Jeanette Winterson, Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?
Sarah Kay, No Matter the Wreckage; “Sliver”
I think this means / there was no night. / The night was in my head.
Louise Glück, from Averno; “Landscape”
Joan Didion, from “Goodbye to All That” in Slouching Towards Bethlehem The National, “Ada” in Boxer (2007)
OCTOBER
henry ward beecher / tell me no secrets by joy fielding / greif by barbera crooker / anne of green gables by l.m. montgomery / two octobers by richmond lattimore / october by bobbi katz / something wicked this way comes by ray bradbury / a word for autmn by a.a. milne / october by robert frost
(image ids under the cut)
[image id:
(1) "October is nature's funeral month. Nature glories in death more than in life. The / month of departure is more beautiful than the month of coming - October than May. / Every green thin loves to die in bright colors"
(2) "October was always the least dependable of months ... full of ghosts and / shadows."
(3) "Yes, the October sunlight wraps me / in its yellow shawl, and the air is sweet / as a golden Tokay"
(4) "I'm so glad I live in a world where there are Octobers. It would be terrible if we just skipped / from September to November, wouldn't it?"
(5) "Circle of gold on gold the year is kind / enough to bind / October on October and the ghost / of a touch lost"
(6) "October is / when night guzzles up / the orange sherbet sunset / and sends the day / to bed / before supper / and / October is when jack-o’-lanterns / grin in the darkness / and / strange company crunches / across the rumple of dry leaves / to ring a doorbell. October is / when you can be ghost, / witch, / a creature from outer space… / almost anything! / And the neighbors, fearing tricks, / give you treats."
(7) "First of all, it was October, a rare month for boys."
(8) "Oh hushed October morning mild, / The leaves have ripened to the fall; / Tomorrow's wind, if it be wild / Should waste them all."
(9) "The of summer is not the end of the world. Here's to october"
/end id]
