2012-03-15 41 notes

[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]

“Phenomenal Woman” read by Maya Angelou

2012-03-01 35 notes

My soul was a light-blue gown, sky-coloured;
I left it on a cliff by the sea
and naked I came to you, resembling a woman.

Edith Södergran

Source: mythologyofblue

2012-02-16 53 notes

It’s after one and you must be asleep.
Or maybe you can feel the night as well.
I’m in no hurry. There’s no need
to wake you or disturb you with telegrams or thunder.

— from the suicide note of Vladimir Mayakovsky, 1930 (trans. Erik Korn)

Source: csee.umbc.edu

Love is not all: it is not meat nor drink
Nor slumber nor a roof against the rain;
Nor yet a floating spar to men that sink
And rise and sink and rise and sink again;
Love can not fill the thickened lung with breath,
Nor clean the blood, nor set the fractured bone;
Yet many a man is making friends with death
Even as I speak, for lack of love alone.
It well may be that in a difficult hour,
Pinned down by pain and moaning for release,
Or nagged by want past resolution’s power,
I might be driven to sell your love for peace,
Or trade the memory of this night for food.
It well may be. I do not think I would.

—Edna St. Vincent Millay

2012-02-06 14 notes

American Football

Hallelujah!
It works.
We blew the shit out of them.

We blew the shit right back up their own ass
And out their fucking ears.

It works.
We blew the shit out of them.
They suffocated in their own shit!

Hallelujah.
Praise the Lord for all good things.

We blew them into fucking shit.
They are eating it.

Praise the Lord for all good things.

We blew their balls into shards of dust,
Into shards of fucking dust.

We did it.

Now I want you to come over here and kiss me on the mouth.

—Harold Pinter

2012-02-01 54 notes

hmhlit:

Hear the late, great, Nobel Prize-winning Wislawa Szymborska read some of her own poetry at an event in Krakow, Poland, January 2009.

Source: hmhlit

2012-01-17 6 notes

“Those who speak know nothing:
Those who know are silent.”
Those words, I am told,
Were spoken by Lao-tzu,
If we are to believe that Lao-tzu
Was himself one who knew,
How comes it that he wrote a book
of five thousand words?

—Po Chu-I, “The Philosophers: Lao-Tzu,” from The Book of Luminous Things and translated from the Mandarin by Arthur Waley

2012-01-12 100 notes

Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing,
there is a field. I’ll meet you there.

When the soul lies down in that grass,
the world is too full to talk about.
Ideas, language, even the phrase each other
doesn’t make any sense.

—Rumi, “Out Beyond Ideas,” from The Book of Luminous Things and translated from Farsi by Coleman Barks and John Moyne

2012-01-07 44 notes

Lord let me suffer much
and then die

Let me walk through silence
and leave nothing behind not even fear

Make the world continue
let the ocean kiss the sand just as before

Let the grass stay green
so that the frogs can hide in it

so that someone can bury his face in it
and sob out his love

Make the day rise brightly
as if there were no more pain

And let my poem standclear as a windowpane
bumped by a bumblebee’s head

—Anna Kemienska, “A Prayer That Will Be Answered,” from The Book of Luminous Things and translated from Polish by Stanislaw Baranczak and Clare Cavanagh