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Not long before her death, Anna Kamieńska wrote what I think is her best poem (available in English, at any rate), a stark, haunting, and insidiously hopeful little gem called "A Prayer That Will Be Answered." The title is worth some stress, in both senses of that word: "A Prayer That Will Be Answered." Lord let me suffer much and then die Let me walk through silence and leave nothing behind not even fear Make the world continue let the ocean kiss the sand just as before Let the grass stay green so that the frogs can hide in it so that someone can bury his face in it and sob out his love Make the day rise brightly as if there were no more pain And let my poem stand clear as a windowpane bumped by a bumblebee's head (tr. by Clare Cavanagh and Stanisław Barańczak) This is an uncanny poem. It gives God all power (the continuance of the world) and no power (it was going to continue anyway). It is implicitly apophatic, you might say. That is, it erases what it asserts: it is a prayer to be reconciled to a world in which prayer does not work.

Christian Wiman, Zero at the Bone: Fifty Entries Against Despair

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The kind of things you have to forget in order to be able to go on living, you know?

— Helen Oyeyemi, from “Is Your Blood as Red as This?” What is Not Yours is Not Yours: Stories (Riverhead Books, 2017)

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hi! I hope it's okay to ask this but I was wondering if you have any poems about quiet, simple love or the kind of love that is soft and gentle and transcends time, not because it's out of this world or needs big gestures or is about star crossed lovers, but because it's safe, and it's about two people who find happiness and pleasure in the small things, dancing in the kitchen, shopping together, cooking together? Im not sure how to explain it, i tried to paint an imagine, maybe it helps. Thank you so much ♥️

Having a Coke with You by Frank O'Hara

For Keeps by Joy Harjo

Mountain Dew Commercial Disguised as a Love Poem by Matthew Olzmann

The Orange by Wendy Cope

Our Beautiful Life When It’s Filled with Shrieks by Christopher Citro

On Loving by Forough Farrokhzad

Yours by Daniel Hoffman

Atlas by U.A. Fanthorpe

Camomile Tea by Katherine Mansfield

Always For The First Time by Andre Breton

You Are the Penultimate Love of My Life. by Rebecca Hazelton

To Be In Love Poem by Gwendolyn Brooks

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Gustave Flaubert, from A Sentimental Education (Roland Barthes, A Lover's Discourse: Fragments, trans. Richard Howard)

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“I could not stop wasting time. It was crazy. I wanted to do something with my life, but instead I went to sleep, or sung in the shower, or sat and stared at the wall. I couldn’t even tell you about anything that I saw. I didn’t talk to anybody. The cicadas kept dying outside, and as I dreamed, my mouth grew thick and venomous with silence.”

Yiwei Chai, The Jacaranda Years

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a you-shaped hole in the universe Celia Paul, Ocean Vuong, Owen Gent, Alejandra Pizarnik (trans. Yvette Siegert), Karman Verdi, Edna St Vincent Millay

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“Nobody tells this to people who are beginners. I wish someone had told me. All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you. A lot of people never get past this phase; they quit. Most people I know who do interesting, creative, work went through years of this. We know our work doesn’t have this special thing that we want it to have. We all go through this. And if you are just starting out or you are still in this phase, you gotta know that it’s normal and the important thing you can do is do a lot of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week you finish one piece. It’s only by going through a volume of work that you will close that gap, and your work will be as good as your ambitions. And I took longer to figure out how to do this than anyone I’ve ever met. It’s gonna take a while. It’s normal to take awhile. You just gotta fight your way through.”

— Ira Glass (via oddhour)

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source article

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conditions of love: the philosophy of intimacy

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i think these go hand in hand <3

— “small kindnesses” by danusha laméris

— ross gay, from the book of delights

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Our Experience of Grief is Unique as a Fingerprint

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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”

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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”

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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”

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friendship IS romance : 1. / 2. / 3. fleabag / 4. / 5. / 6. / 7. / 8. a little life, hanya yanagihara  / 9. / 10. 

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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”