#poe

Dear to me is sleep: still more, being made of stone, While pain and guilt still linger here below, Blindness and numbness--these please me alone; Then do not wake me, keep your voices low. ↗

— Michelangelo Buonarroti

#guilt

The Garden En robe de parade. - Samain Like a skein of loose silk blown against a wall She walks by the railing of a path in Kensington Gardens, And she is dying piece-meal of a sort of emotional anaemia. And round about there is a rabble Of the filthy, sturdy, unkillable infants of the very poor. They shall inherit the earth. In her is the end of breeding. Her boredom is exquisite and excessive. She would like some one to speak to her, And is almost afraid that I will commit that indiscretion. ↗

— Ezra Pound

#personae #poem #poetry #boredom

JAPAN Today I pass the time reading a favorite haiku, saying the few words over and over. It feels like eating the same small, perfect grape again and again. I walk through the house reciting it and leave its letters falling through the air of every room. I stand by the big silence of the piano and say it. I say it in front of a painting of the sea. I tap out its rhythm on an empty shelf. I listen to myself saying it, then I say it without listening, then I hear it without saying it. And when the dog looks up at me, I kneel down on the floor and whisper it into each of his long white ears. It's the one about the one-ton temple bell with the moth sleeping on its surface, and every time I say it, I feel the excruciating pressure of the moth on the surface of the iron bell. When I say it at the window, the bell is the world and I am the moth resting there. When I say it at the mirror, I am the heavy bell and the moth is life with its papery wings. And later, when I say it to you in the dark, you are the bell, and I am the tongue of the bell, ringing you, and the moth has flown from its line and moves like a hinge in the air above our bed. ↗

— Billy Collins

#japan #poem #life

We like to admit to only that which already glows, although it is nobler to support brightness before it glows, not afterwards. ↗

— Dejan Stojanovic

#books #brightness #dejan-stojanovic #glow #literature

‎I was satisfied with haiku until I met you, jar of octopus, cuckoo's cry, 5-7-5, but now I want a russian novel, a 50-page description of you sleeping, another 75 of what you think staring at your window. ↗

— Dean Young

#poetry #love

While pensive poets painful vigils keep, Sleepless themselves, to give their readers sleep. ↗

— Alexander Pope

#enlightenment #poetry #satire #satire

a politician is an arse upon which everyone has sat except a man ↗

— E.E. Cummings

#poems #poetry #politicians #politics #satire

You will always be the bread and the knife, not to mention the crystal goblet and—somehow—the wine. ↗

— Billy Collins

#wine

Too lazy to be ambitious, I let the world take care of itself. Ten days' worth of rice in my bag; a bundle of twigs by the fireplace. Why chatter about delusion and enlightenment? Listening to the night rain on my roof, I sit comfortably, with both legs stretched out. ↗

— Ryokan

#buddhist #hermit #japan #japanese #monk

...if you do not even understand what words say, how can you expect to pass judgement on what words conceal? ↗

— H.D.

#doolittle #h-d #hilda #modernism #poetry