thatcoldbeneath - Tumblr blog

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40,000 years ago, early humans painted hands on the wall of a cave. This morning, my baby cousin began finger painting. All of recorded history happened between these two paintings of human hands. The Nazca Lines and the Mona Lisa. The first TransAtlantic flight and the first voyage to the Moon. Humanity invented the wheel, the telescope, and the nuclear bomb. We eradicated wild poliovirus types 2 and 3. We discovered radio waves, dinosaurs, and the laws of thermodynamics. Freedom Riders crossed the South. Hippies burned their draft cards. Countless genocides, scientific advancements, migrations, and rebellions. More than a hundred billion humans lived and died between these two paintings—one on a sheet of paper, and one on the inside of a cave. At the dawn of time, ancient humans stretched out their hands. And this morning, a child reached back. 

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it's december happy "I Heard a Bird Sing" by oliver herford season

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Sonnet: Against Entropy

John M. Ford

The worm drives helically through the wood And does not know the dust left in the bore Once made the table integral and good; And suddenly the crystal hits the floor. Electrons find their paths in subtle ways, A massless eddy in a trail of smoke; The names of lovers, light of other days Perhaps you will not miss them. That's the joke. The universe winds down. That's how it's made. But memory is everything to lose; Although some of the colors have to fade, Do not believe you'll get the chance to choose. Regret, by definition, comes too late; Say what you mean. Bear witness. Iterate.

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~ Wilfred Owens, "Dulce et Decorum Est"

via poetryfoundation.org

text id under cut-off

[ID/ Wilfred Owens poem, "Dulce et Decorum Est"

"Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,

Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,

Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs,

And towards our distant rest began to trudge.

Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots,

But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;

Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots

Of gas-shells dropping softly behind.

Gas! GAS! Quick, boys!—An ecstasy of fumbling

Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time,

But someone still was yelling out and stumbling

And flound’ring like a man in fire or lime.—

Dim through the misty panes and thick green light,

As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.

In all my dreams before my helpless sight,

He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.

If in some smothering dreams, you too could pace

Behind the wagon that we flung him in,

And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,

His hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin;

If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood

Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,

Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud

Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,—

My friend, you would not tell with such high zest

To children ardent for some desperate glory,

The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est

Pro patria mori.

/end ID]

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Conjuration, 2018 - oil on canvas. — Devinez

https://devinez.com.pl/

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Rare pity, mercy and compassion of the giants called humanity

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from the introduction to emily wilsons translation of the iliad

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@fairycosmos / Comic by @shhhitsfine / Comic by @incendavery

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Sue zhao/Ryan O'Connell

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an incomplete collection of tweets i consider to be short poems

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Anthony Bourdain, from Les Halles Cookbook

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there is a tendency with history, i think, because we're so far removed from it, to kind of forget that all of the people were people

a child 10,000 years ago left a handprint on a wall. they were fingerpainting. a viking climbs up a rock just to carve the words "this is very high" 10ft off the ground. somebody centuries... milennia... ago burned their dinner so thoroughly that they buried the ruined pot in the backyard rather than attempt to clean it. shakespeare got drunk and wrote dick jokes. tutankhamun was a little boy who liked ducks more than anything. a roman carves his name into a monument in another country saying "i was here". a prisoner, centuries ago, in the tower of london scratches lines into the wall as a tally marking the days. a medieval monk scrawls in the margins bemoaning the boredom of his work.

every human being across history has said "i was here. i lived. i loved. i made something. i laughed. i cried. please do not forget me"

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Knight at the Crossroads by Viktor Vasnetsov (1882)

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eurydice - sarah ruhl