T.W.

“first narcissi
Persephone walks out of
the underground station

spring day
announcement said
no flowers

with or without you
bindweed climbing
both sides of the wall

I will go now
where my eyes carry me
poplar fluff

she comes to me
attired only
in a short night

slow train home
a cloud’s shadow running
across the stubble

bitter wind
the smell of honey
in the empty hive

the fragrance
of pencil shavings
September rain

all the wealth
that he left
golden leaves

her hands tremble
like captured birds
winter wind

a few words
from the doctor
crows on snow

shape of her sleep
on the down pillow
snowy morning”
― Ernest Wit, The Touch of the Intangible: Haiku Collected and Selected

“in fact
I’m looking for courage, for some evidence
my life will change, though
it takes forever, checking
each clump for the symbolic
leaf, and soon the summer is ending, already
the leaves turning, always the sick trees
going first, the dying turning
brilliant yellow, while a few dark birds perform
their curfew of music. You want to see my hands?
As empty now as at the first note.
Or was the point always
to continue without a sign?”
― Louise Glück, The Wild Iris

“Such weight, on the earth, is on our shoulders: gravity keeping us at home. But on the water we shake off the harness of weight; we glide; we are passengers of a sleek ocean bird with its single white wing filled with wind.”
― Mary Oliver, Long Life: Essays and Other Writings

“To speak of reality becoming a spectacle is a breathtaking provincialism. It universalizes the viewing habits of a small, educated population living in the rich part of the world, where news has been converted into entertainment—that mature style of viewing which is a prime acquisition of "the modern," and a prerequisite for demanding traditional forms of party-based politics that offer real disagreement and debate. It assumes that everyone is a spectator. It suggests, perversely, unseriously, that there is no real suffering in the world. But it is absurd to identify the world with those zones in the well-off countries where people have the dubious privilege of being spectators, or of declining to be spectators, of other people's pain, just as it is absurd to generalize about the ability to respond to the sufferings of others on the basis of the mind-set of those consumers of news who know nothing at first hand about war and massive injustice and terror. There are hundreds of millions of television watchers who are far from inured to what they see on television. They do not have the luxury of patronizing reality.”
― Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others