I Seek A Truth Only A Breadth Away From Mine

“I desired always to stretch the night and fill it fuller and fuller with dreams.”

— Virginia Woolf, from ‘The Waves’

i am begging you all to stop treating this site like instagram if you dont want it to be content free by next year

on winter and longing

Sarah Kay, Natalie Diaz, Craig Keenan, Clarice Lispector, Mahmoud Darwish, Brittany Cossette, Franz Kafka, Edvard Munch, Richard Siken, Haruki Murakami, Holly Warburton, Mahmoud Darwish

buy me a coffee

Much of what happens to us in life is nameless because our vocabulary is too poor. Most stories get told out loud because the storyteller hopes that the telling of the story can transform a nameless event into a familiar or intimate one. We tend to associate intimacy with closeness and closeness with a certain sum of shared experiences. Yet in reality total strangers, who will never say a single word to each other, can share an intimacy — an intimacy contained in the exchange of a glance, a nod of the head, a smile, a shrug of a shoulder. A closeness that lasts for minutes or for the duration of a song that is being listened to together. An agreement about life. An agreement without clauses. A conclusion spontaneously shared between the untold stories gathered around the song.

John Berger, "Some Notes on Song (for Yasmine Hamdan)"

Richard Hugo, Essay on Poetic Theory: The Triggering Town

Wednesday, 28th July 2021

Love is more than the dream wistfully painted across torn pages in dripping ink and meadows of wildflowers, by writers and poets huddled by candlelight seeing love written in beloved faces. Seeing love in yearning clouds slowly chasing after the sun's fragile rays. Love is heartache and hurt and pain - a climbing river pushing back against everything you know. It inspires and challenges, it breathes life and ends it. It is everything we want and everything we do not dare to have. Love can bring just as much destruction to the harmony it creates. But it’s never about what love is or what it is not - it is how we shape its destiny within our own lives that counts. Love will always be with you, but will you let it stay? And sometimes we know that we just have to chase it away. 

The days are spent in glory and sun

until rain casts its violent shadow;

a storm to herald a setting moon

and bring life again, glory again --

                                  -- it will be here soon

Elizabeth Bishop, The Complete Poems 1927-1979; from 'The Moose'