Linda Pastan, from Waiting for My Life: Poems; "What We Want"
[Text ID: "and in the morning / our arms ache. / We don't remember the dream, / but the dream remembers us."]
13K notes
·
View notes
ethics by Linda Pastan
740 notes
·
View notes
Wildflowers
by Linda Pastan
You gave me dandelions.
They took our lawn
by squatters’ rights —
round suns rising
in April, soft moons
blowing away in June.
You gave me lady slippers,
bloodroot, milkweed,
trillium whose secret number
the children you gave me
tell. In the hierarchy
of flowers, the wild
rise on their stems
for naming.
Call them weeds.
I pick them as I
picked you,
for their fierce,
unruly joy.
258 notes
·
View notes
In the evening my griefs come to me one by one. They tell me what I hoped to forget. They perch on my shoulders like mourning doves. They are the colour of light fading.
~Linda Pastan
217 notes
·
View notes
Ada Limon
James Baldwin
Autumn, Ali Smith
Hamlet, Shakespeare
Residual Hauntings, Psychic Library
Autumn, Ali Smith
The Five Stages of Grief, Linda Pastan
Hauntology: How the Ghosts of our Past haunt our Future, Vincent Freeland
BBC Archive - What is Hauntology
Hauntology
225 notes
·
View notes
There are poems
that are never written,
that simply move across
the mind
like skywriting
on a still day:
slowly the first word
drifts west,
the last letters dissolve
on the tongue,
and what is left
is the pure blue
of insight, without cloud
or comfort.
~ ‘There are Poems’, by Linda Pastan
From Carnival Evening: New and Selected Poems, 1968-1998
W.W. Norton, 1998.
178 notes
·
View notes
Linda Pastan, from Waiting for My Life: Poems; "Excursion"
[Text ID: I am a tourist / in my own life, / gazing at the exotic shapes / of flowers / as if someone else / had planted them;"]
657 notes
·
View notes
[december] by Linda Pastan
366 notes
·
View notes
This is the very
essence
of flight—a bird
so swift
that only memory
can capture it.
Linda Pastan, Almost an Elegy; "Memory of a Bird"
99 notes
·
View notes
Agoraphobia
by Linda Pastan
"Yesterday the bird of night did sit,
Even at noon-day, upon the marketplace,
Hooting and shrieking."
—William Shakespeare
1.
Imagine waking
to a scene of snow so new
not even memories
of other snow
can mar its silken
surface. What other innocence
is quite like this,
and who can blame me
for refusing
to violate such whiteness
with the booted cruelty
of tracks?
2.
Though I cannot leave this house,
I have memorized the view
from every window—
23 framed landscapes, containing
each nuance of weather and light.
And I know the measure
of every room, not as a prisoner
pacing a cell
but as the embryo knows
the walls of the womb, free
to swim as its body tells it, to nudge
the softly fleshed walls,
dreading only the moment
of contraction when it will be forced
into the gaudy world.
3.
Sometimes I travel as far
as the last stone
of the path, but
every step,
as in the children's story,
pricks that tender place
on the bottom of the foot,
and like an ebbing tide with all
the obsession of the moon behind it,
I am dragged back.
4.
I have noticed in windy fall
how leaves are torn from the trees,
each leaf waving goodbye to the oak
or the poplar that housed it;
how the moon, pinned
to the very center of the window,
is like a moth wanting only to break in.
What I mean is this house
follows all the laws of lintel and ridgepole,
obeys the commandments of broom
and of needle, custom and grace.
It is not fear that holds me here but passion
and the uncrossable moat of moonlight
outside the bolted doors.
160 notes
·
View notes
Questi sentieri inchiostrati
che si aprono nel futuro, pagina
dopo pagina, ogni libro
il proprio orizzonte sfuggente.
Linda Pastan, Sera di Carnevale
54 notes
·
View notes
the months by linda pastan / christmas mass by clarence gagnon
316 notes
·
View notes