emcyan

[emcyan]

Genoa, the University, John Singer Sargent

Medium: watercolor

https://www.wikiart.org/en/john-singer-sargent/genoa-the-university-1911

[emcyan]

Trouble the Water, Derrick Austin

[emcyan]

You get a strange feeling when you’re about to leave a place. Like you’ll not only miss the people you love but you’ll miss the person you are now at this time and this place, because you’ll never be this way ever again.

Azar Nafisi; Reading Lolita in Tehran

[emcyan]

Emil Cioran, All Gall is Divided

[emcyan]

“That summer we sat with our backs to the street, letting time pass— lying all afternoon in the grass as if green and insect were the world. I am, I am, and you are, you are, we wrote, until the paper seemed a tree again and we walked beneath it greener and unsullied afresh.”

— Deborah Landau, from Soft Targets, via poets.org (via bostonpoetryslam)

[emcyan]

Rainer Maria Rilke in a letter to Lou Andreas-Salomé, published in Rilke and Andreas-Salomé: A Love Story in Letters

[emcyan]

ossip zadkine museum, paris, france

[emcyan]

A place is not only a geographical area; it's also a state of mind. And trees are not just trees; they are the ribs of childhood.

Mahmoud Darwish, Journal of an Ordinary Grief

[emcyan]

“I don’t remember how to say home in my first language, or lonely,, or light I remember only delam barat tang shodeh, I miss you, and shab bekheir, goodnight.”

Kaveh Akbar, ‘Do You Speak Persian?’

“I can’t speak my own language - Iesu, All those good words; And I outside them.”

R.S. Thomas, ‘Welsh’

“It’s an ancient story from yesterday evening called “Patterns of Love in Peoples of Diaspora,” called “Loss of the Homeplace and the Defilement of the Beloved,” called “I Want to Sing but I Don’t Know Any Songs”.”

Li-Young Lee, ‘Immigrant Blues’

“The fact that I am writing to you in English already falsifies what I wanted to tell you. My subject: how to explain to you that I don’t belong to English though I belong nowhere else.”

Gustavo Pérez Firmat, Bilingual Blues

[emcyan]

“We cannot live in a world that is interpreted for us by others. An interpreted world is not a home. Part of the terror is to take back our own listening. To use our own voice. To see our own light.”

— Hildegard von Bingen, from ‘Selected Writings’ (via letheane)

[emcyan]

Anne Carson, Wrong Norma

[emcyan]

egon schiele, self portrait as st. sebastian, 1914, pencil on paper

[emcyan]

National Tile Museum in Lisbon. Would recommend.

[emcyan]

Joanna Klink, "Wayfaring“, Raptus

[emcyan]

you think this happened only once and long ago by Marie Howe

[emcyan]

Ivan Rabuzin (Croatian, 1921-2008), Paesaggio sotto la neve [Landscape under Snow], 1972. Oil on canvas, 61 x 81 cm.

[emcyan]

My love, I was so wrong. Dying is the opposite of leaving. When I left my body, I did not go away. That portal of light was not a portal to elsewhere, but a portal to here. I am more here than I ever was before. I am more with you than I ever could have imagined. So close you look past me when wondering where I am. It’s Ok. I know that to be human is to be farsighted. But feel me now, walking the chambers of your heart, pressing my palms to the soft walls of your living. Why did no one tell us that to die is to be reincarnated in those we love while they are still alive? Ask me the altitude of heaven, and I will answer, “How tall are you?�� In my back pocket is a love note with every word you wish you’d said. At night I sit ecstatic at the loom weaving forgiveness into our worldly regrets. All day I listen to the radio of your memories. Yes, I know every secret you thought too dark to tell me, and love you more for everything you feared might make me love you less. When you cry I guide your tears toward the garden of kisses I once planted on your cheek, so you know they are all perennials. Forgive me, for not being able to weep with you. One day you will understand. One day you will know why I read the poetry of your grief to those waiting to be born, and they are all the more excited. There is nothing I want for now that we are so close I open the curtain of your eyelids with my own smile every morning. I wish you could see the beauty your spirit is right now making of your pain, your deep seated fears playing musical chairs, laughing about how real they are not. My love, I want to sing it through the rafters of your bones, Dying is the opposite of leaving. I want to echo it through the corridor of your temples, I am more with you than I ever was before.  Do you understand? It was me who beckoned the stranger who caught you in her arms when you forgot not to order for two at the coffee shop. It was me who was up all night gathering sunflowers into your chest the last day you feared you would never again wake up feeling lighthearted. I know it’s hard to believe, but I promise it’s the truth. I promise one day you will say it too– I can’t believe I ever thought I could lose you.

love letter from the afterlife, andrea gibson