May 2013
1 post
6 tags
“Some words live in my throat
breeding like adders. Other know sun
seeking like...”
– Audre Lorde, from “Coal“
April 2013
1 post
6 tags
“ Okay, Ophelia ”
We’ve heard you were a victim.
Stop crouching...”
– Jeannine Hall Gailey, “Okay, Ophelia” (from her collection “Becoming the Villainess”
March 2013
2 posts
6 tags
“…You’ve kissed my hair
to wake me. I dreamed you were a poem,
I...”
– Adrienne Rich, from Part II of “Twenty-One Love Poems”
7 tags
“Ah, but high, high in the air I flew.
And far, far beyond the curb of her will,...”
– Robert Duncan, “My Mother Would Be a Falconress“
February 2013
9 posts
6 tags
“On this winter night
my eyes were closed
with ice.
I wore out the darkness...”
– Izumi Shikibu, from “The Diary of Izumi Shikibu” (10th-11th century)
6 tags
“Coming together
it is easier to work
after our bodies
meet
paper and pen...”
– Audre Lorde, “Recreation“
5 tags
“Will he always love me?
I cannot read his heart.
This morning my thoughts...”
– Lady Horikawa, Untitled (12th century)
6 tags
“Don’t suppose that the weightless phantom
will disappear.
It is lurking...”
– Betti Alver, from “The Titans” (translated by: Willis Barnstone and Felix Oinas)
5 tags
“It’d be great
if all I had to do was save my own soul;
but since other...”
– Shuntaro Tanikawa, from “Written at 14th E 28th Street, New York City” (1975)
6 tags
“And the swan keep swimming across the years,
Deeply in love with his disturbing...”
– Anna Akhmatova, from “Summer Garden” (translated by: Stephen Stepanchev)
4 tags
“Eyes shut tight
I hear my brains go splat and scatter
like dry tea-leaves.
I...”
– Sachiko Yoshihara, from “Madness”
4 tags
“I could not hope
to touch the sky
with my two arms.”
– Sappho (translated by Willis Barnstone)
7 tags
“I walk alone in the cold end of winter.
Perhaps we’ll meet when the moon...”
– Yu Hsuan-chi, from “Spring Thoughts Sent to Tzu-an” (ca. 843-868)
5 tags
“I am too near to be dreamt of by him.
I do not fly over him, do not escape from...”
– Wislawa Szymborska, from “I Am Too Near”
January 2013
14 posts
7 tags
“You dreamt on the immense river
devoured by a flame of moon…”
– Yvonne Caroutch, from an untitled poem
7 tags
“Since I entered the inner rooms
I haven’t see the spring.
I write this...”
– Anonymous Palace Woman, “Written on a Leaf” (ca. 790)
5 tags
“You seem to play
with the great hill and the clearness of the sky:
to please...”
– Cesare Pavese, from “Nocturne”
4 tags
“As their figures vanish in the distance
Only my love remains.”
– Ts’ai Yen, from “18 Verses Sung to a Tatar Reed Whistle”
7 tags
“You are only a white and sweetly gentle cloud
entangled one night among ancient...”
– Cesare Pavese, from “Nocturne”
7 tags
“The woman is perfected.
Her dead
Body wears the smile of accomplishment,
The...”
– Sylvia Plath, from “Edge” (dated on February 5th, 1963, six days before her death)
8 tags
“I am a bunch of red roses.
You hurt me
like the helpless nightingale
you...”
– Bayati, from “Love Songs“
5 tags
“Your love turned my body
into water.”
– Empress Nur Jahan, from an untitled poem
5 tags
“Once again that loosener of limbs, Love,
bittersweet and inescapable, crawling...”
– Sappho, Fragment 130A (translation by Diane Rayor)
7 tags
“The ancient gods changed men to things, but left them
A consciousness that...”
– Anna Akhmatova, from “Like a White Stone“
6 tags
“From childhood’s hour I have not been
As others were; I have not...”
– Edgar Allan Poe, from “Alone” (Submitted by lost-in-this-strange-world)
7 tags
“What would happen if one woman told the truth about
her life?
The world would...”
– Muriel Rukeyser, from “Kathe Kollwitz”
5 tags
“My voice rings down through thousands of years
To coil around your body and...”
– Rita Mae Brown, “Sappho’s Reply”
December 2012
3 posts
5 tags
“The strange abyss is burning under us;
And we sail onward, and our wake is...”
– Fyodor Tyutchev, from “As Ocean’s Stream”
7 tags
“The shining dark of your golden eyes I bless!
That broke my dark delirium with...”
– Valery Brusov, from “Benediction”
3 tags
“She’s always been there
occupying the same room.
It was only when I...”
– from “Interface”, by Gloria Anzaldua
November 2012
1 post
8 tags
“Time, in its stealthy gliding, cheats us all
Without our notice; nothing goes...”
– Ovid, from “Venus and Adonis” in the Metamorphoses
October 2012
1 post
5 tags
“…I drew my breath
from you at the first and so now I lull
my mouth to...”
– Sophocles, from “Oedipus the King”
September 2012
1 post
5 tags
“Someone, I say to you,
will think of us
in some future time”
– Sappho, Fragment 147
July 2012
10 posts
1 tag
There won’t be any more posts for a few weeks, but don’t unfollow! I’m just on an Internet-free vacation. Right now, actually, because this is on a queue….
6 tags
“Rife are the roads
Of immortal song…”
– The Story of Io,
4 tags
“I love refinement and for me Love has the splendour and beauty of the sun.”
– Sappho, fragment 76
5 tags
“These were the things they said to one another
under the rim of earth where...”
– Homer, from “The Odyssey” (Book XXIV)
5 tags
“I want to flood you with unrest…
… Like dying I want to pierce...”
– Rainer Maria Rilke, from “Sappho to Eranna” (1907)
4 tags
“…And find me, swiftly, an empty carriage,
One that’s just been hung...”
– Robert Chandler, “Poem on the Underground” (1998)
5 tags
“Then rose the white moon.
My love is whiter.
White as salt
Drawn from bitter...”
– Sappho, fragment (from Handel’s Cardinal)
5 tags
“…But such desire is in him
merely to see the hearthsmoke leaping upward...”
– Homer, from “The Odyssey” (Book 1)
7 tags
“Some day the Earth will be only
A blind space which turning
Mingles night and...”
– Jules Supervielle, from “Prophecy”
4 tags
“Just now the golden-sandalled Dawn [has called]…”
– Sappho, fragment 18
June 2012
15 posts
6 tags
“The universe around me utters a cruel sigh,
And the deep gorge of the sky...”
– James Supervielle, from “The Grief of the Dead”
5 tags
“There is an unfeminine, (but oh, so Female)
sureness in my hands…”
– Susan Saxe, from “Questionnaire” (from “Notes from the First Year”)
5 tags
“She bent to tie her beautiful sandals on,
ambrosial, golden, that carry her...”
– Homer, from “The Odyssey” (Book I)
4 tags
“I am tired, Beloved, of chafing my heart against
The want of you;
Of squeezing...”
– Sappho, fragment 168B
5 tags
“The old threats are leaving me.
I am living.”
– Aaron Shurin, “Exorcism of the Straight/Man/Demon”
5 tags
““… but she said
“What you have seen is beyond speech,
beyond...”
– Eavan Boland, from “The Journey” (1990)
4 tags
“… to stay
In the singing flesh of the poet
Haunted by words which...”
– James Supervielle, from “The Survey” 