Category: landscape

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A Bird came down the Walk—
He did not know I saw—
He bit an Angleworm in halves
And ate the fellow, raw

-Emily Dickinson

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we were sometimes troubled & tired,

sad for no reason, 

& so pretended we were not birds
& fell like stones—

[…]

we told ourselves that this falling—

we would remember. We thought
we would always
be birds. We didn’t know.

-Joe Wilkins

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“Above All things, we want freedom. Freedom to know Our own desires. We want to follow them where they lead.

[…]

Ebry day fishing day, but ebry day no fe catch fish. (Reward does not always follow labour.)

[…]

None but ourselves can free our minds. (Garvey via Marley)”

-Zadie Smith, Wife of Willesden

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rather a landscape shaped by or fixed about mutable objects, expansive and pliable conditions…

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“On the map it is precise and rectilinear as a chessboard

[…]

though here and there a weathered post asserts a former claim

[…]

What grows in that place is possessed of a beauty all its own, ramshackle and unexpected”

–Campbell McGrath.

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“… Unkept

By the present tense, I was distant 

In my watching,

An existence I too tendered stagily 

As free.

[…]

the flowing virtue 

Of verdant surfaces”

—Hanae Jonas

What must be valued
I’m learning,

in clarity and in error,
are spaces

where
feelings are held.

Here—in a poem?
And elsewhere

(JJ)

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