a shape changer in winter

37, NC, he/them 

Everyone reblog with your most unemployable traits

Okloue // fall

“Your absence has gone through me Like thread through a needle. Everything I do is stitched with its color.”

W. S. Merwin, Separation

Got up on a cool morning. Leaned out a window. / No cloud, no wind. Air that flowers held / for awhile. Some dove somewhere. // Been on probation most of my life. And / the rest of my life been condemned. So these moments / count for a lot—peace, you know. // Let the bucket of memory down into the well, / bring it up. Cool, cool minutes. No one / stirring, no plans. Just being there. // This is what the whole thing is about.ALT

William Stafford, “Just Thinking,” in Ask Me

image

​found this comment on a video of some swans crossing the street. wow.

“Remind me again—together we trace our strange journey, find each other, come on laughing. Some time we’ll cross where life ends. We’ll both look back as far as forever, that first day. I’ll touch you—a new world then. Stars will move a different way. We’ll both end. We’ll both begin. Remind me again.”

— William Stafford, “Our Story”, in Stories That Could Be True

“Listen, I love you. Do not turn your face Nor touch me. Only stand and watch awhile The blue unbroken circle of the sea. Look far away and let me ease my heart Of words that beat in it with broken wing. Look far away, and if I say too much, Forget that I am speaking. Only watch, How like a gull that sparkling sinks to rest, The foam­ crest drifts along a happy wave Toward the bright verge, the boundary of the world.”

Sara Teasdale, from “All beauty calls you to me, and you seem,” Rivers to the Sea (Macmillan, 1920)

It is not
the altar that matters,
not that,
nor the shape
that is found there.
The ghostly ideas
come and go, one after another.
But the place endures.
The fact that there is a door.

Jane Hirshfield, "Love amid Owl Cries", The Lives of the Heart

I am susceptible to despair.

Given our current world, where almost every day, you turn on the news, and it’s devastating. Even now, it never stops being devastating. I thought it was going to quiet down, and it hasn’t. And for me, one of the great uses of poetry and one of the great needs for poetry is an antidote to despair.

I am susceptible to despair. But I know it serves no one. And so I’m always looking for antidotes to despair. And poems are a terrific antidote to despair. Because no matter what is happening in your life or the world’s life, if you can write words to have a conversation with what you feel about this, what you see, even your own impotence, even your own I have nothing here, if you can say that in words that are new and different and distinctive and only that moment’s language, you do have agency.

You change the world and yourself by changing your thoughts. And first, you change yourself. And then maybe you change the world. And then maybe you help somebody else in their moment of great despair — or their moment of great joy.

— Jane Hirshfield, from an Interview with Ezra Klein in The New York Times, March 3, 2023