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in the pressing heat of the summer night

everything feels quite wrong

i am not where i ought to be

i dream of trees, and asphalt

of a boat on a sand-sea

of a shrouded lantern

of a mountain

of water

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- A Meditation in the Eighth House in Early Spring, by Ire of Sinshan, by Ursula K. Le Guin in Always Coming Home

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Fauna, Richard Siken

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Prageeta Sharma, from “I Am Learning to Find the Horizons of Peace”, You Are Here: Poetry in the Natural World

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sweet moon

hanging low in the rugged sky

i could just eat you

or maybe i want you to swallow me up

cream-pale

streaked clouds half-veil you

god, i could smoke you

i could live forever right here

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Mary Oliver, "From The Book of Time." Devotions

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"Inside, we’re ageless. And when we talk to ourselves, it’s the same person we were talking to, the same age, when we were little, and it’s the body that’s changing around that ageless center." -David Lynch

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Madwoman, Shara McCallum

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“To learn which questions are unanswerable, and not to answer them: this skill is most needful in times of stress and darkness.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin, from The Left Hand of Darkness

“Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke, from Letters to a Young Poet

“And maybe that’s all I wanted—to be asked a question and have it cover me, like a roof the width of myself.”

— Ocean Vuong, from On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous

“[…] the openness to revelation. Which is another way of saying, to being wrong about what is possible and true.”

— Karen Russell, from “The Ghost Birds”

But, anyway, aren’t there moments that are better than knowing something, and sweeter?

— Mary Oliver, from “Snowy Night”

“In the end I would rather wonder than know.”

— Mary Ruefle, from “On Secrets,” in Madness, Rack, and Honey

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Leonard Cohen, 2006

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The ashkey doesn't mean to fall from the branch.

It's quite the shock, a sudden detachment, the loss of anything solid to hold,

What world is this? It thinks,

Where am I now? Where is my body, vast and outstretching? (The tree knows the key is only one part of it, has seen many come and go - the key has only ever known the tree)

It might feel endless, the spiral drop, the flight inflicted by the breeze on something that has never known anything more forceful than the shiver of a branch.

It might feel like being a raindrop.

It might not feel like anything much.

It might feel like a death. An ending,

The gentle pull of gravity ferrying it to a resting place among the leaf litter

It doesn't know it is a seed yet.

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the men in myth and legend be

by all accountes of historie

inspired to die in final stands

to perish at great evil's hands

they prove their might in ways galore

defined by what they do it for

for king and country, love and peace,

for goodness until all things cease

and what comes after? who can say

the martyrs all have had their day

the champions sleep, at end of life

deservingly divorced from strife

i have no grand heroic cause

but in the throes of pain, a pause

a thought that tells of endless rest

with which i may, in time, be blessed

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never/forever

one leaf torn from the tree

to the leaf: all

to the tree: none

all lost, all changed

none felt, none known

like a hair from a head

like a brick from a city

like a whisper in a crowd

like a plea to the heavens

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i'm hungry. i think my dead mother would be disappointed in me because i'm fat. i wish i knew her. i wish she could teach me how to cook

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Night Poem, Leila Chatti