dig

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

What must be valued
I’m learning,

in clarity and in error,
are spaces

where
feelings are held.

Spaces, Jenny Johnson

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.

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

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