December 2010
16 posts
“When they ask to see your gods
your book of prayers
show them lines
drawn...”
– J.L. Stanley, Catechism for a Witch’s Child (via sarahjune)
“The weight of the world is love. Under the burden of solitude, under the burden of dissatisfaction the weight, the weight we carry is love.”
-Allen Ginsburg
“You ask
why I make my home
in the mountain forest,
and I smile,
and am...”
– Li Po (701 - 762)
Poetry is not an expression of the party line. It’s that time of night, lying in bed, thinking what you really think, making the private world public, that’s what the poet does.
Concentrate on what you want to say to yourself and your friends. Follow your inner moonlight; don’t hide the madness. You say what you want to say when you don’t care who’s listening.
...
Have you ever tried to enter the long black branches of other lives — tried to imagine what the crisp fringes, full of honey, hanging from the branches of the young locust trees, in early morning, feel like? Do you think this world was only an entertainment for you? Never to enter the sea and notice how the water divides with perfect courtesy, to let you in! Never to lie...
A valley and above it forests. A voyager arrives, a map leads him there. Or perhaps memory. Once long ago in the sun, When snow first fell, riding this way He felt joy, strong, without reason, Joy of the eyes. Everything was the rhythm Of shifting trees, of a bird in flight, Of a train on the viaduct, a feast in motion. He returns years later, has no demands. He wants only one, most precious...
Music is a never-ending mystery. I think the perfect music is probably silence. As musicians, all we really do is we create a rather beautiful and ornate frame for that perfection which is silence.
-Sting
An Afternoon in the Stacks
Closing the book, I find I have left my head
inside. It is dark in here, but the chapters open their beautiful spaces and give a rustling sound, words adjusting themselves to their meaning. Long passages open at successive pages. An echo, continuous from the title onward, hums behind me. From in here, the world looms, a jungle redeemed by these linked sentences carved out when an author traveled...
You are not surprised at the force of the storm— you have seen it growing. The trees flee. Their flight sets the boulevards streaming. And you know: he whom they flee is the one you move toward. All your senses sing him, as you stand at the window. The weeks stood still in summer. The trees’ blood rose. Now you feel it wants to sink back into the source of everything. You thought ...
“If only we knew
as the carver knew, how the flaws
in the wood led his...”
– David Whyte (via noornalini)
