Vincent Van Gogh
After great pain a formal feeling comes– The nerves sit ceremonious like tombs; The stiff Heart questions–was it He that bore? And yesterday–or centuries before? The feet, mechanical, go round A wooden way Of ground, or air, or ought, Regardless grown, A quartz contentment, like a stone. This is the hour of lead Remembered if […]
Oscar Wilde
You were the one for skylights, I opposed Cutting into the seasoned tongue-and-groove Of pitch pine. I liked it low and closed, Its claustrophobic, nest-up-in-the-roof Effect. I liked the snuff-dry feeling, The perfect, trunk-lid fit of the old ceiling. Under there, it was all hutch and hatch. The blue slates kept the heat like midnight […]
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
When despair for the world grows in me and I wake in the night at the least sound in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be, I go and lie down where the wood drake rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds. I come into the […]
Barbara Rappelle-toi Barbara Il pleuvait sans cesse sur Brest ce jour-là Et tu marchais souriante Épanouie ravie ruisselante Sous la pluie Rappelle-toi Barbara Il pleuvait sans cesse sur Brest Et je t’ai croisée rue de Siam Tu souriais Et moi je souriais de même Rappelle-toi Barbara Toi que je ne connaissais pas Toi qui ne […]
Flannery O’Connor
Coming up Buchanan Street, quickly, on a sharp winter evening a young man and two girls, under the Christmas lights – The young man carries a new guitar in his arms, the girl on the inside carries a very young baby, and the girl on the outside carries a chihuahua. And the three of them […]
Some people know what it’s like,to be called a cunt in front of their children to be short for the rent to be short for the light to be short for school books to wait in Community Welfare waiting-rooms full of smoke to wait two years to have a tooth looked at to wait another […]