Latest Posts by moonlitmirror - Page 5

Thursday, 26th August 2021

I haven't left but the spiders are already moving in

I find them in my bed, my curtains, dead and coiled in an old blanket fort

They ring the chimes that hang from my ceiling light

And find space among the creaking boards

I had a dream of this once, spiders hung in every corner and footfall

Taking over my life, my memories, as they crawl into the space left before

It is only when I know I am leaving, that I see the dust in the corner

And the tide coming in from the far away shore

Changeling Child

I thought jewelweed pods were fairy peas and I picked them carefully so they would not pop and spoil my gift. I laid them carefully on leaf platters, along with berries my mother told me not to eat and colorful flower petals. A perfect feast.  I had a stone circle built, a fairy circle, a castle, an altar, and there I left my offerings. Sometimes I wanted a wish in return. Sometimes I needed the fae to remember that I knew how to take care of my own kind. 

I will learn strength in compassion, so perhaps I will begin with understanding myself.

“The moon grows out of the hills A yellow flower, The lake is a dreamy bride Who waits her hour.”

— Sara Teasdale, from Stresa; Rivers to the Sea: Poems, 1915

I'd prefer to sit awhile

waiting for the storm to come

the heavens rush and clamour and sing

but the rain is kept hidden

beneath the canopy of this weeping willow tree

Friday, 23rd July 2021

The moon was swallowed in a throbbing light

As the thunder began its climbing flight

And in the dawn of a swelling tide

She saw inside the world dressed in spite

I am hollow in this coursing wind, a brightened shell and song within.

I am raging in this ocean sky, the greying light a burning sign.

I am buried in my absent mind, wrapped and beating this blurry sound.

For one gradually passing moment

the swirling mist clears a path

leaving cool crystals grasping

onto each strand of grass

i am haunted. i am my own haunting. i am the ghost in the graveyard of my body, mournful, monstrous.

Even in shadow

does nature thrive

a silent spectre

full of bristling sighs

with a glimmer

the light then shows

the blooming tree preserved

alive in its shadow

I would love to see a collection of quotes about the moon/moongazing. Thanks

"We looked at the moon and the moon looked at us."

— Helen Oyeyemi, from ‘White Is for Witching’

"How bright, glaring-bright, the moon […] Shreds of cloud blowing across it like living things."

"A cold-glaring full moon suspended in the sky like the unblinking eye of God."

— Joyce Carol Oates, from ‘We Were the Mulvaneys’

"There is something haunting in the light of the moon; it has all the dispassionateness of a disembodied soul, and something of its inconceivable mystery."

— Joseph Conrad, from 'Lord Jim'

"As the moon’s shadow passes over you—like a rush of gloom, a tornado, a cannonball, a loping god, the heeling over of a boat, a slug of anaesthetic up your arm…"

— Anne Carson, Decreation: Poetry, Essays, Opera; from ‘Totality: The Colour of Eclipse’

"Under the shield of night, / let me unburden the moon."

— Forugh Farrokhzad, Reborn; from ‘Border Walls’, tr. Sholeh Wolpé

"The moon is my mother. She is not sweet like Mary. / Her blue garments unloose small bats and owls."

— Sylvia Plath, Ariel; from 'The Moon and the Yew Tree'

"The brimming moon looked through me and I could not move."

— Ted Hughes, Recklings; from ‘Keats’

"The full moon is out, casting her equivocal corpse-glow over all."

— Margaret Atwood, from ‘The Testaments’

"I never go walking in the moonlight, never, without being met by thoughts of my dead, without the feeling of death and of the future coming over me."

— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, from ‘The Sorrows of Young Werther’ tr. David Constantine

"And the moon is wilder every minute."

— W. B. Yeats, Michael Robartes and the Dancer; from 'Solomon and the Witch'

"A moon loosened from a stag’s eye,"

— Theodore Roethke, Praise to the End!; from ‘Give Way, Ye Gates’

"Moon full, moon dark,"

— Sylvia Plath, Collected Poems; from ‘Goatsucker’

"Let’s order one last round and kiss in front of god and the rest of the drunks, then pour ourselves out into the night, following the moon anywhere but home."

— William Taylor Jr., from ‘Literary Sexts: Volume 2′

"In the window, the moon is hanging over the earth, / meaningless but full of messages."

— Louise Glück, A Village Life; from ‘A Village Life’

"while from the moon, my lover’s eye / chills me to death"

— Sylvia Plath, Collected Poems: Juvenilia; from ‘To a Jilted Lover’

"The moon has a strange look to-night. Has she not a strange look? She is like a mad woman, a mad woman who is seeking everywhere for lovers."

"Look at the moon! How strange the moon seems! She is like a woman rising from a tomb. She is like a dead woman."

"Oh! How strange the moon looks. You would think it was the hand of a dead woman who is seeking to cover herself with a shroud."

— Oscar Wilde, from 'Salomé'

"The moon has nothing to be sad about, / Staring from her hood of bone. / She is used to this sort of thing. / Her blacks crackle and drag."

— Sylvia Plath, Collected Poems; from ‘Edge’

"Where, indeed does the moon not look well? What is the scene, confined or expansive, which her orb does not hallow?"

— Charlotte Brontë, from 'Villette'

"And the tarnished sliver of moon glows / Like an old serrated knife."

— Anna Akhmatova, Seventh Book: from ‘In a Broken Mirror’, tr. Judith Hemschemeyer

"In the full moon you dream more."

— Margaret Atwood, Morning in the Burned House; from ‘The Ottawa River By Night’

"…the moon appeared momentarily […] her disk was blood-red and half overcast; she seemed to throw on me one bewildered, dreary glance, and buried herself again instantly in the deep drift of cloud.

— Charlotte Brontë, from ‘Jane Eyre’

"It is not so much moonless as the moon is seen nowhere / And always felt."

— Dorothea Lasky, Black Life; from ‘Poets, You Are Eager’

"If the moon smiled, she would resemble you. / You leave the same impression / Of something beautiful, but annihilating."

— Sylvia Plath, Ariel; from ‘The Rival’

Black foggy mountains

bow beneath the legacy

of a golden sun

Somedays, my soul yearns

For you, as it spills itself

On my pages, prose or poetry

Words or thorns, just to

Quench itself, it does it all.......

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. 

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

— Virginia Woolf, from ‘The Waves’

I want to melt your layers of snow

and uncover where your flowers grow

from the wounds and scars you try to conceal

But I hope you know its okay to feel

All those raw emotions too

when you feel you can't get out of bed

in your shades of red and teary blue

Know all you feel is a part of being real

And give yourself some time to heal

m.w

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

Tuesday, 20th July 2021

At night in quiet solitude of the passing day

I turn the yellowing pages of the waxing moon

Molten in a burning light to show its age

And cast in pooling stains of inky blue

It glows in flickers of a dying candle light

Wrapped in a purple wreath, delicately crowned

An encroaching darkness consuming the night

It dims its eyes to rest amongst the drowned

Monday, 19th July 2021

I have scars on my knees from when I was six, hopeful of the days that I could run free from the tangled branches enclosing my mind. They wrapped me in with faces whose eyes always slipped across mine. And then they found my legs and let me slip, numb again from yesterday's wound. I would run, all limitations abandoned, chasing the friends I wasn't close to, always branches apart from the world I was already consumed by. But I was happy. And then I would fall. It happened again and again until I saw the danger in falling, now white stretching marks across the bottom of my knees. I saw the danger in everything.

Any quotes about night and stars, please? ✨

"The night is shaped like a howling wolf."

— Alejandra Pizarnik, Extracting the Stone of Madness; from ‘Paths of the Mirror’, tr. Yvette Siegert

"Then, it being night, and the twin stars of Castor and Pollux just visible in the sky, I spoke of that tragedy, of two brothers whose love we might find unnatural, so stricken in grief when one was killed that the other, begging for his life again, accepted instead that for half the year one might live, and for the rest of the year the other, but never the two together. So it is for us, who while on earth in these suits of lead sense the presence of one we love, not far away but too far to touch."

— Jeanette Winterson, from 'Sexing the Cherry'

"The night is cold and delicate and full of angels"

— John Ashbery, Rivers and Mountains; from ‘The Ecclesiast’

"Oh starry starry night! This is how / I want to die."

— Anne Sexton, All My Pretty Ones; from ‘The Starry Night’

"Life is too short to be all daylight. Night is not less; it’s more."

—Jeanette Winterson, from 'Why I adore the night'

"…a strange night-time otherworld of darkness and starlight and the fine line between life and death."

— Katherine Clements, from 'The Coffin Path'

"But the Orphics say that black-winged Night, a goddess of whom even Zeus stands in awe, was courted by the Wind and laid a silver egg in the womb of Darkness; and that Eros, whom some call Phanes, was hatched from this egg and set the Universe in motion."

—Robert Graves, from 'The Greek Myths: The Complete and Definitive Edition'

"That doesn’t stop me having a tremendous need for, shall I say the word — for religion — so I go outside at night to paint the stars [...]"

— Vincent van Gogh

"Night. Such a beautiful word."

— Janet Fitch, from 'Chimes of a Lost Cathedral'

"Why shun darkness? / The night abounds with diamond drops."

— Forugh Farrokhzad, Asir (Captive); from 'On Loving', tr. Sholeh Wolpé

"Dear, though the night is gone, / Its dream still haunts to-day,"

— W. H. Auden, Selected Poems; from ‘Dear, though the night is gone’

"There was a star riding through clouds one night, and I said to the star, "Consume me."

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

— Virginia Woolf, from 'The Waves'

"By day I am nothing, by night I am myself."

Fernando Pessoa, from 'The Book of Disquiet', tr. Margaret Jull Costa

"...the frozen glitter of stars, shattered glass on black silk..."

— Maggie O' Farrell, from 'Hamnet'

"I sometimes fancy that my body is made up of all the different stars. Leo’s in my chest; I’m sure it’s Leo because my heart roars."

— Jeanette Winterson, from 'Boating for Beginners'

"Night, the night again, the magisterial wisdom of the dark."

— Alejandra Pizarnik, A Musical Hell; from ‘Desire for the Word’, tr. Yvette Siegert

"If only at the midnight hour / You’d send me a greeting across the stars."

— Anna Akhmatova, Seventh Book; from Sweetbrier In Blossom; ‘In a Dream’, tr. Judith Hemschemeyer

"Under the shield of night, / let me unburden the moon."

— Forugh Farrokhzad, Reborn; from ‘Border Walls’, tr. Sholeh Wolpé

"The night snows stars and the earth creaks."

— Ted Hughes, Wodwo; from ‘The Howling of Wolves’

Sara Teasdale, from 'Two Songs for Solitude; The Crystal Gazer' published in 'American Poetry, 1922: A Miscellany'

You can get lost in nature

it entices you into its graceful grasp

luring you into a dream

of eternal sunshine

—Ocean Vuong.

—May Sarton.

“Forgive me if I don’t talk much at times. It’s loud enough in my head.”

— Unknown

You walk with stars on your feet

trailing glory in your waking path

rosy fingers grazing smokey clouds to meet

the dawning skies above

Thursday, 8th July 2021

There is freedom in the shadowed storm as the veil-wrapped sky billows in a climbing release. I lay here on the rough strewn ground, a wilderness of rain-kissed grass, tumbled yarn, and loose cut threads. Find me in the running lake carving eyes into the overgrown path, lost to the planted sky now curling into a silver smile.

Freedom is more than just running through the rain on Thursday afternoons.

Wednesday, 7th July 2021

As the thunder roars in such tumultuous pain, the sun singes the rim of every cloud until the whole sky is cloaked in a brightened sadness, a softening grey. And the world will sit in shallow wine while the teardrops of the encroaching night play in ripples across the sun's sleeping face, waiting for the moon blank and ghostly behind the starless sky. It is new tonight but hidden from sight, it bows in heavenly patience.

Midsummer

I feel laden with unsaid dreams

spilling over my hair, my feet

walking through a daylit night

full of sparkling stars and troubled sleep

There are roses in your cheeks

and violets in your eyes -- 

all devotion to the setting skies