Praise the mutilated world
and the gray feather a thrush lost,
and the gentle light that strays and vanishes
and returns.

-Adam Zagajewski’s poem, translated by Clare Cavanagh, was published on the final page of The New Yorker special issue following 9/11/01.
(It is also the poem that made me want to learn Polish)
#everynightapoem as ever as ever

The art of our time is noisy with appeals for silence. A coquettish, even cheerful nihilism. One recognizes the imperative of silence, but goes on speaking anyway. Discovering that one has nothing to say, one seeks a way to say that.

Susan Sontag (1967)
#everynightapoem #ofsorts

“…because were she to die here they would cover her up with a stone, and in the mind of a woman for whom no place is home the thought of an end to all flight is unbearable.”
-The Unbearable Lightness of Being (trans. from the Czech by Michael Henry Heim)

Ave atque vale, Milan Kundera (1 April 1929-11 July 2023), and safe travels.
#everynightapoem #MilanKundera

Suppose I say summer

-Raymond Carver, “Hummingbird”
(For Tess)

From “A New Path to the Waterfall” - completed in the last weeks of his life and published posthumously
#everynightapoem #poetry

After every war
someone has to tidy up.
Things won’t pick
themselves up, after all.

Someone has to shove
the rubble to the roadsides
so the carts loaded with corpses
can get by.

-Wisława Szymborska, “The End and the Beginning” (t. Cavanagh & Barańczak)
#everynightapoem #war

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
#everynightapoem #poetry

life; London; this moment of June.

Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway
#everynightapoem #ofsorts #june

They fuck you up, your mum and dad.   
    They may not mean to, but they do.   
They fill you with the faults they had
    And add some extra, just for you.

-Philip Larkin, This Be The Verse

#everynightapoem because how delightful and odd it was to encounter Larkin (whose poems I like keenly and share often) - on Ted Lasso last night

The trees are coming into leaf
Like something almost being said;
The recent buds relax and spread,
Their greenness is a kind of grief.

-Phillip Larkin, The Trees
#everynightapoem as ever, for the evergreen grief of spring.

I’ve found a prisoner’s letters to a lover—
One begins: ”These words may never reach you.”
Another ends: ”The skin dissolves in dew
without your touch.” And I want to answer:
I want to live forever. What else can I say?
It rains as I write this. Mad heart, be brave.

-Agha Shahid Ali (1949-2001),
from The Country Without a Post Office
#everynightapoem #fragment #poetry

Verde que te quiero verde
(Green how I want you green)

Federico Garcia Lorca’s bedroom, in Granada

(📷 with thanks to another poet, Pedro Larrea)
#everynightapoem #ofsorts

Qing Ming Festival falls on April 5 this year.

Once again I find myself far from home and unable to sweep my loved ones’ tombs; so instead, sharing a small and most familiar poem.

#清明 #遙祭 #everynightapoem #translation #chinese #poetry

Resharing this poem by Teju Cole yet again, yet again, yet again.

"I think of others, alive today, soon to die /
(who knows when or whom, maybe you or me)"

-Teju Cole, "Live Update"
#everynightapoem

Quiero hacer contigo lo que la primavera hace con los cerezos

[I want to do with you what spring does with cherry trees]

-Pablo Neruda, Poema XIV (20 poemas de amor y una canción desesperada)

#VernalEquinox #春分の日
#everynightapoem #poetry #translation #neruda

From you have I been absent in the spring

–
They were but sweet, but figures of delight
Drawn after you, – you pattern of all those.
Yet seem’d it winter still, and, you away,
As with your shadow I with these did play.

-William Shakesepeare, Sonnet 98 (full poem in image description)
#everynightapoem #poetry #sonnet #shakespeare #vernalequinox #春分

"Elegy" by W.S. Merwin
(September 30, 1927- March 15, 2019)
One of my all time beloved poets, with whom I share a birthday, and who left us on this day.

#everynightapoem #WSMerwin #poetry

“Don’t be afraid of the clocks, they are our time, time has been generous to us.

We are synchronized, now and forever.
I love you.”

-Félix Gonzáles-Torres (1957-1996)
Letter to Ross Laycock, 1988
#everynightapoem #ofsorts #clocks

"I am reduced to a thing that wants Virginia."

-Vita Sackville-West
letter to Virginia Woolf
Milan [posted in Trieste], Thursday, 21 Jan 1926

#everynightapoem #ofsorts #epistolary #VitaSackvilleWest #VirginiaWoolf

“I prefer the time of insects to the time of stars."

-Wisława Szymborska, “Possibilities” trans. Stanislaw Barańczak and Clare Cavanagh

(my poet crush has the last word in the season of awakening insects)
#everynightapoem #驚蟄 #microseasons #poetry #translation #insects #szymborska

“I prefer the time of insects to the time of stars."

-Wisława Szymborska, “Possibilities” trans. Stanislaw Barańczak and Clare Cavanagh

(my poet crush has the last word in the season of awakening insects)
#everynightapoem #驚蟄 #microseasons #poetry #translation #insects #szymborska