dig

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I seek for rhythmic whisperings
Where noises bandy—
For life I listen wistfully
In footless banter.

I cast wide nets and tentative
In lakes of sorrow.
I go toward final tenderness
By pathways sordid.

I look for dewdrops glistering
In falsehood’s gardens.
I save truth’s globules glistening,
From dust-heaps garnered.

I fain would fathom fortitude
Through years of wormwood—
And pierce the mortal fortalice,
Yet live, a worldling.

My cup, through ways impassable,
To bear, untainted;
By tenebrous bleak passages
To joy attaining.

Zinaida Gippius, translated by Babette Deutsch and Avrahm Yarmolinsky

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What must be valued
I’m learning,

in clarity and in error,
are spaces

where
feelings are held.

Spaces, Jenny Johnson

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The Haiti That Still Dreams. The country is being defined by disaster. What would it mean to tell a new story? By Edwidge Danticat. New Yorker, April 23, 202

“Nou se wozo / Menm si nou pliye, nou pap kase.” Even if we bend, we will not break.

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when a gaze picks out
the shape of a deer
from the surrounding moor
it is as if something
within the deer
an embarrassment of content
had risen to the surface
[…]

Flight Across the Heather, Thomas A. Clark

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For the sword outwears its sheath,

   And the soul wears out the breast,

And the heart must pause to breathe,

   And love itself have rest.

So We’ll Go No More a Roving, Byron

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“a kind of purple/blue that makes you think not of sadness but of wonder” Kincaid