A Writer's Ruminations

"I still feel that poetry is not medicine — it’s an X-ray. It helps you see the wound and understand it. We all feel alienated because of this continuous violence in the world. We feel alone, but we feel also together. So we resort to poetry as a possibility for survival."

— Dunya Mikhail 

"You tried to change didn’t you?
closed your mouth more
tried to be softer
prettier
less volatile, less awake
but even when sleeping you could feel
him travelling away from you in his dreams
so what did you want to do love
split his head open?
you can’t make homes out of human beings
someone should have already told you that
and if he wants to leave
then let him leave
you are terrifying
and strange and beautiful
something not everyone knows how to love."

— Warsan Shire, “For Women Who Are Difficult to Love,”  (via sotla)

"

I had the dream where you read your own poems,
Like those written sometime ago,
only these were in the grey book
written after death…

And you look finer, paler and tinier every passing moment,
Then you disappear.

The last to vanish were your hands
And only the poems were left unharmed
And in the poems was left
someone’s heart.

— Grażyna Chrostowska, “The Dream” translated by Jarek Gajewski (via ophelia sings)

"The suffering touched me too early,
I have burned myself out,
I am the bright ash without desire.
Now, only the silence endures dearly,
When I am still standing in the fire."

— Grażyna Chrostowska, written in Ravensbrück 13th April 1942 translated by Jarek Gajewski (via ophelia sings)

"Moments are passing by, empty or bleak.
They are never as we wish.
Nobody’s day follows a beaten path.
Colorless and wasted, lost in helplessness,
And in every moment….
Think about this - life is passing, running out,
So what am I waiting for?
Though nothing abides."

— Grażyna Chrostowska, “Moments” translated by Jarek Gajewski (via ophelia sings)

"Into what waters do we fall
when we leave, if time does not exist?
What is the depth of heaven?"

— Manuel Ulacia, from “The Stone at the Bottom” (translated by Reginald Gibbons)

"to my daughter i
will say, when the men come, set
yourself on fire."

— Warsan Shire, “In Preparation for War”

(Source: 2000anhour)

"I was asleep while you were dying.
It’s as if you slipped through some rift, a hollow
I make between my slumber and my waking,

the Erebus I keep you in, still trying
not to let go. You’ll be dead again tomorrow,
but in dreams you live. So I try taking

you back into morning. Sleep-heavy, turning,
my eyes open, I find you do not follow.
Again and again, this constant forsaking."

— Natasha Trethewey, from “Myth”

"… how horrible it was, how little
there was to say about how horrible it was."

— Bob Hicok, from “In the Loop” (adapted from poetrysociety)

(via proustitute)

"…though grief would come later and it was a relief
to know I wasn’t alone…"

— Gerald Stern, from “Day of Grief” (via proustitute)

"But women have survived, and our feelings have survived. As poetry. And there are no new pains. We have felt them already. We have hidden that fact in the same place where we have hidden our power. They lie in our dreams, they lie in our poems, and it is our dreams and our poems that point the way to our freedom."

— Audre Lorde, “Poetry Makes Something Happen”

"Poetry is not a luxury. For the quality of light by which we scrutinize our lives has direct bearing upon the product which we live, and upon those changes we hope to bring about through those lives. This is poetry as illumination, for it is through poetry that we give name to those ideas which are, until the poem, nameless and formless, about to be birthed, but already felt. That distillation of experience from which true poetry springs births thought as dreams birth concepts, as feeling births ideas, as knowledge births or precedes understanding."

— Audre Lorde, “Poetry Makes Something Happen”

"My poetry is not separate from my living, nor is yours. The only way we can teach another person to create poetry is to teach that person how to feel herself or himself. The experience of poetry is intimate, and it is crucial. For that reason, of course, it is often resented or resisted. The pursuit of one’s own poetry is basically a subversive activity, because the pursuit of one’s feelings colors one’s total existence, and we are paid well for refusing to feel ourselves."

— Audre Lorde, “Poetry Makes Something Happen”