eliamatrell

[eliamatrell]

hi hello i remade

u can find me at @letterful now! 🧚🏼‍♀️

[eliamatrell]

ON DEATH, WITHOUT EXAGGERATION,

or: a few of my favourite poems about dying, being dead, & the ones who are left behind. some melancholic, some upbeat, some morbid, some euphemistic, some sombre, some tongue-in-cheek, some direct, some not, all good. in no particular order:

“on death, without exaggeration“, wisława szymborska (oh, it has its triumphs, / but look at its countless defeats, / missed blows, / and repeat attempts!)

“the suicide’s room”, wisława szymborska (a lamp, good for fighting the dark / a desk, and on the desk a wallet, some newspapers / carefree buddha and a worried christ / seven lucky elephants, a notebook in a drawer.)

“the letters of the dead”, wisława szymborska (poor dead, blindfolded dead, / gullible, fallible, pathetically prudent.)

(can you see that i’m very fond of wisława szymborska?)

“harlod’s leap”, stevie smith (it may have killed you / but it was a brave thing to do.)

“not waving but drowning”, stevie smith (i was much further out than you thought / and not waving but drowning)

“a meeting”, wendell berry (he has, / i know, gone long and far, / and yet he is the same / for the dead are changeless.)

“the dead”, billy collins (the dead are always looking down on us, they say)

“memory”, hayden carruth (my dear, / how could you have let this happen to you?)

“her long illness”, donald hall (daybreak until nightfall, / he sat by his wife at the hospital / while chemotherapy dripped / through the catheter into her heart.)

“this is a photograph of me”, margaret atwood (the photograph was taken / the day after i drowned.)

“owl song”, margaret atwood (i do not want revenge, i do not want expiation, / i only want to ask someone / how i was lost, / how i was lost)

“anne sexton’s last letter to god”, tracey herd (i have just lunched with an old friend / saying goodbye and something / ‘she couldn’t quite catch’.)

“ophelia’s confession”, tracey herd (i didn’t drown by accident. it was a suicide. / at least let me call my mind my own / even when my heart was gone beyond recall.)

“the promise”, marie howe (he looked at me as though he couldn’t speak, as if / there were a law against it, a membrane he couldn’t break.)

“aubade”, philip larkin (being brave / lets no one off the grave. / death is no different whined at than withstood.)

“lady lazarus”, sylvia plath (and i a smiling woman. / i am only thirty. / and like the cat i have nine times to die.)

“edge”, sylvia plath (her bare / feet seem to be saying: / we have come so far, it is over.)

“sylvia’s death”, anne sexton (what is your death / but an old belonging, / a mole that fell out / of one of your poems?)

“a curse against elegies”, anne sexton (also, i am tired of all the dead. / they refuse to listen)

“tomorrow they’ll cut me open”, anna swir (i have many powers in me. i can live, / i can run, dance and sing. / all of that is in me, but if need be, / i’ll walk away.)

“biology teacher”, zbigniew herbert (in the second year of the war / our biology teacher was killed / by history’s schoolyard bullies)

“dedication”, czesław miłosz (you whom i could not save / listen to me.)

“dirge without music”, edna st. vincent millay (they are gone. / they are gone to feed the roses.)

the rosie probert scene in “under milk wood”, dylan thomas (remember her. / she is forgetting. / the earth which filled her mouth / is vanishing from her.)

“do not go gentle into that good night”, dylan thomas (old age should burn and rave at close of day; / rage, rage against the dying of the light)

“a quoi bon dire?”, charlotte mew (and everybody thinks that you are dead, / but i.)

“myth”, natasha trethewey (you’ll be dead again tomorrow, / but in dreams you live. so i try taking / you back into morning.)

“i watched you disappear”, anya krugovoy silver (are you there? where? / are the others there, too?)

“i am asking you to come back home”, jo carson (my mamma used to say she could feel herself / runnin’ short of the breath of life. so can i. / and i am blessed tired of buryin’ things i love.)

“the night where you no longer live”, meghan o’rourke (was there gas station food / and was it a long trip)

“condolence”, dorothy parker (but i had smiled to think how you, the dead, / so curiously preoccupied and grave, / would laugh, could you have heard the things they said.)

“death at daybreak”, anne reeve aldrich (i shall pass dawn on her way to earth, / as i seek for a path through space.)

“fear no more the heat o’ the sun”, william shakespeare (golden lads and girls all must, / as chimney-sweepers, come to dust.)

“sonnet xciv”, pablo neruda (don’t call up my person. i am absent. / live in my absence as if in a house.)

“funeral blues”, w. h. auden (the stars are not wanted now; put out every one, / pack up the moon and dismantle the sun, / pour away the ocean and sweep up the wood)

“the drowned children”, louise glück (but death must come to them differently, / so close to the beginning.)

“because i could not stop for death”, emily dickinson (the carriage held but just ourselves – / and immortality.)

[eliamatrell]

Then she spoke—she said my name—and I, who did not love her, opened my arms.

RICHARD JONES, from “The Loft.”

[eliamatrell]

She is dead. Almost certainly dead. Nearly conclusively dead. She is, at the very least, not answering her telephone.

CATHERYNNE M. VALENTE, from Radiance.

#my new account 👁

[eliamatrell]

Look at yourselves from a distance, I cried, look at yourselves from a distance of stars.

WISŁAWA SZYMBORSKA, from “Cassandra.” 

[eliamatrell]

Plac Unii Lubelskiej w Warszawie (1930).

Koloryzacja: Mariusz Zając.

#pre-ww2 photos of warsaw make my heart ache #god's unfavourite child

[eliamatrell]

Gémeaux (Les Signes du Zodiaque)

#lookbook

[eliamatrell]

*ignores you and pursues my rituals*

#vibes

[eliamatrell]

I am a convict (...) You are my guard. Our fate is therefore one.

MARINA TSVETAEVA, from “Poems for Akhmatova,” trans. Elaine Feinstein.

#marina tsvetaeva #poetry #poems #litblr #booklr #* #*fragments

[eliamatrell]

Elia (Hebrew, Elijah): i.e. my god is the lord

“Oberyn wanted vengeance for Elia. Now the three of you want vengeance for him. I have four daughters, I remind you. Your sisters. My Elia is fourteen, almost a woman.”

#asoiaf #beloved

[eliamatrell]

I love this luxury loving bitch 💕❤️💖

#that's me WIFE #tw3 #jaga does gaming

[eliamatrell]

Coming soon!

#ff7r #jaga does gaming

[eliamatrell]

#nightmarescapes

[eliamatrell]

do you happen to have any quotes about gluttony and/or devouring? thank you!!

Last year I abstained this year I devour

without guilt which is also an art

—Margaret Atwood, Circe/Mud Poems

“We aren’t here to eat, we are being eaten. / Come, pretty girl. Let us devour our lives.”

—Natalie Diaz, “Soiree Fantastique”

"O God, that I were a man! I would eat his heart in the marketplace!”

 — William Shakespeare, Much Ado About Nothing

“What is it in me would devour the world to utter it? What is it in me will not let the world be, would eat not just this fish, but the one who killed it, the butcher who cleaned it […] I would eat it all to utter it.”

— Li-Young Lee, “The Cleaving”

“There’s a YouTube video I’m fond of that shows a baby named Madison being given cake for the first time. The maniacal shine in her eyes when she first tastes chocolate icing is transcendent, a combination of “where has this been all my life” and “how dare you keep this from me?” Jaw still dropped in shock, she slowly tips the cake up towards her face and plunges in mouth-first. Periodically, as she comes up for air, she shoots the camera a look that is almost anguished. Can you believe this exists? her face says. Why can’t I get it all in my mouth at once?”

— Jess Zimmerman, “Hunger Makes Me”

“Hungry for the kill, but this hunger, it isn't you Voices disappear when you are speaking in somber tunes I will be the wolf and when you're starving, you'll need it too Hungry for the kill, but this hunger, it isn't you”

— Monsters of Men, “Hunger”

“In the end the heart turns on itself / like hunger to a spoon.”

— Silvia Curbelo, “Tonight I Can Almost Hear the Singing”

Tell me it was for the hunger / & nothing less. For hunger is to give / the body what it knows / it cannot keep.”

— Ocean Vuong, “On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous”

“Because desire won’t shrug off, and the heart begins to eat its stores its substance—slowly, at first, and sparingly— (but nothing’s left to lose so it is downed) We have a thing here called hunger A feeling and an ache, want of want. You could try it sometime if you like.”

— Hannah Sanghee Park, “[Because desire won’t shrug off]”

“If the story begins with the lack of a child, then hunger becomes central. Food often replaces sex in folktales, and witches with some rule-bound delicacy are the fertility specialists of choice, second only to daring the fairies to give you a baby hedgehog, a snow-child, or an infant the size of your thumb. The trouble starts when a childless queen is given specific instructions– eat the white rose for a boy or the red rose for a girl, but not both. Eat the fair flower and not the bitter, black one. Peel both onions before you eat them. Folklorists would group all of these motifs under the number “T511– conception from eating,” with increasingly specific Dewey-Decimal-style numbers for conception from a flower or a fish, from swallowing a pearl or a peppercorn. Inevitably, the queen fails the interdiction, because she forgets the warning, or because the first thing she eats is so delicious she just can’t help it. Without that failure, there would be no story. Interdiction, violation: a rule is broken and the world is changed.”

—Kristiana Willsey, “Hunger is the Beginning of every Folktale”

“I saw him open his mouth wide...As though he had wanted to swallow all the air, all the earth, all the men before him.”

— Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness

“She had wanted to eat the whole fruit. Knowing there would be hell to pay upstairs, he stopped her. Heartsick, she refuses to look at him – seven pomegranate seeds clutched in her hand and the always ravenous hunger.”

— Mary Jo Bang, “Persephone Leaving”

“What are we made of but hunger and rage?”

— Anne Carson, “To Compostela”, Plainwater

“Of all the female sins, hunger is the least forgivable; hunger for anything, for food, sex, power, education, even love. If we have desires, we are expected to conceal them, to control them, to keep ourselves in check. We are supposed to be objects of desire, not desiring beings. We do not need food: in many ways, we are food, trainable meat, lambs queueing up to buy mint sauce. We consume only what we are told to, from lipstick to life insurance, and only what will make us more consumable ourselves, the better to be chewed up and swallowed by a machine that wants our work, our money, our sexuality broken down into bite-sized chunks.”

— Laurie Penny, Unspeakable Things

“The rain knows I am full of ghosts. / Take my hair out of its fraying knot. / Give me this hunger and nothing else.”

— Ana Carrizo, “Full of Ghosts”

“It’s a mean thing to be alive And it’s a mean thing God did To make us To make us hunger.”

— Nick Narbutas, “The Language of the World”

“I will wait until the end of all things, and I will eat the sun and I will eat the moon.”

— Neil Gaiman, Norse Mythology

“I have never known peace like the damp grass that yields to me / I have never known hunger like these insects that feast on me”

— Hozier, “In a Week”

[Verse 1] At seventeen I started to starve myself I thought that love was a kind of emptiness And at least I understood then the hunger I felt And I didn't have to call it loneliness

[Chorus] We all have a hunger We all have a hunger We all have a hunger We all have a hunger”

— Florence and the Machine, “Hunger”

“I am starved for stimulation. I am so hungry I could eat a moon.”

— Sarah Jean Grimm, “Regarding Pilgrims”

“Eat me, drink me; thirsty, cankered, goblin-ridden, I go back and back to him to have his fingers strip the tattered skin away and clothe me in his dress of water, this garment that drenches me, its slithering odour, its capacity for drowning.”

— Angela Carter, “The Erl-King”

“In the desert I saw a creature, naked, bestial, Who, squatting upon the ground, Held his heart in his hands, And ate of it. I said, “Is it good, friend?” “It is bitter—bitter,” he answered; “But I like it “Because it is bitter, “And because it is my heart.”

— Stephen Crane, “In the Desert”

“After two praying mantises mate, the nervous system of the male begins to shut down / while he still has control over his motor functions he flops onto his back, exposing his soft underbelly up to his lover like a gift / she then proceeds to lovingly dice him into tiny cubes spooning every morsel into her mouth  she wastes nothing even the exoskeleton goes she does this so that once their children are born she has something to regurgitate to feed them now that.. is selflessness”

— Jared Singer, “An Entomologist’s Last Love Letter”

“Once, I asked for your favourite feeling. You said hunger.”

— Mary Szybist, “To Gabriela at the Donkey Sanctuary”

#neither wine nor fruits can appease my desire

[eliamatrell]

why is it that whenever I am disillusioned with the world I go back to the epic of Gilgamesh

“It is the story of their becoming human together.”

This is it. This is the oldest written literary work that we know of, and it’s a story of becoming human together.

This is a story about love, and it’s a story about death, and we told this story thousands of years ago, THOUSANDS of years. We have always, always, always been wrestling with this profoundly beautiful existence and with knowing one another, while knowing that we all will die and be forgotten.

We become human by loving, but we also become human by knowing death.

And I’m just sitting here touching other human beings, another human experience, from across millennia, feeling a bit more human too through it, and I am trying very hard not to cry.

#on stories

[eliamatrell]

Zjawa II (2016) - Maria Danielak

#ths

[eliamatrell]

A Nightmare on Elm Street - Wes Craven - 1984 - USA

#nightmarescapes