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People aren't homes, they never will be. People are rivers, always changing, forever flowing. They will disappear with everything you put inside them.

~ Nikita Gill

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— Edna St. Vincent Millay, from a letter to Arthur Davison Ficke featured in Savage Beauty: The Life of Edna St. Vincent Millay.

#it’s true

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Mary Oliver, from “We Should Be Well Prepared”, Red Bird

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Eclipse of the Sun in Venice in July 8, 1842 by Ippolito Caffi.

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This desire for home is the secret which hurts so much that you take your revenge on it by calling it names like Nostalgia and Romanticism and Adolescence or maybe the future; the secret also which pierces with such sweetness that when, in very intimate conversation, the mention of it becomes imminent, we grow awkward and affect to laugh at ourselves; the secret we cannot hide and cannot tell, though we desire to do both. We cannot tell it because it is a desire for something that has never actually appeared in our experience. We cannot hide it because our experience is constantly suggesting it, and we betray ourselves like lovers at the mention of a name. Our commonest expedient is to call it beauty and behave as if that had settled the matter. My expedient was to identify it with certain moments in my own past. Probably to make sense of it. But all this is one big misconception. If I had gone back to those moments in the past, i would not have found the thing itself, but only the reminder of it. I am living in tiny fragments that don’t seem to exist anymore, it’s like I’ve robbed time into my conscience and I cannot give it back.

#iwriteandwrite #some of this doesn’t make sense but some of this was written many years ago and they only just make sense so give it a few years

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Margaret Atwood, from The Blind Assassin  

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I feel it shifting

The season

But also my skin

The music in my head going slower

The sky almost blinding the iris when I stare at it

I’m here I can feel it

But it’s different I know it

#iwriteandwrite #duno

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I’ve been withdrawing from everything

Like an addict who knows what’s good for them

Like the way my mother would say no if I asked for another sweet

The disposition to know when enough is enough and

Quite the opposite too

To give so much to a version of myself that is now running with no fuel for words

Dare I say empathy too

The tank is empty

The paint is dry

No candles left to burn

The tap

Drip Drop

The sound lulls me back

Just not to sleep

I’m awake constantly

#iwriteandwrite #it’s relentless #I am lost

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exurb1a, from "Climbing Gym" in Poems for the Lost Because I'm Lost Too

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littlepie.hoian

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Mahmoud Darwish, Memory for Forgetfulness: August, Beirut, 1982 (trans. Ibrahim Muhawi) [ID'd]

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unkept by Noor Hindi

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17th century Ottoman tent from the Dresden State Art Collections

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On the gloomy days like this

I revisit my favourite songs

Captured in my imagination

One instrument strumming

The mountains peaking through the trees

The trees beginning in the water

But growing out of it

Almost trying to reach the snowy air

Even though it’s only May

-

I have this ability

To put myself in a trance

It’s a gift to myself

I don’t think I could survive here if I didn’t

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It’s February now

Cold and brittle

Things are getting harder

Growing titles

But growing pains

Time is running out on me

In every sphere

More so in my head than in this orbit

But I have so much to carry

Aching bones and a running oxygen tank

I am trying to recover

But it’s hard with the weight of the tears

I must endure

I must remain stoic

And I must return myself to a trance of music

#iwriteandwrite

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Gavin Yuan Gao, from "Lullaby"

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Regretfully, I had to leave all my books behind. I couldn’t bear to make the choice between my beloveds, so I left them all.   Give them back. Give us back our beds. Give us back our offices. And give us back our books.

Nabil S., from "It Was All Songs: A Letter From Gaza" translated from the Arabic by Sarah Aziza, published in Mizna on February 12th, 2024. You can read the entire essay here.