Bethan Wallace

“You want me to be a tragic backdrop so that you can appear to be illuminated, so that people can say ‘Wow, isn’t he so terribly brave to love a girl who is so obviously sad?’ You think I’ll be the dark sky so you can be the star? I’ll swallow you whole.”
― Warsan Shire

“A falling star fell from your heart and landed in my eyes.
I screamed aloud, as it tore through them, and now it's left me blind.

The stars, the moon, they have all been blown out.
You left me in the dark.
No dawn, no day, I'm always in this twilight.
In the shadow of your heart.

And in the dark, I can hear your heartbeat.
I tried to find the sound.
But then it stopped, and I was in the darkness,
So darkness I became.


I took the stars from my eyes, and then I made a map.
And knew that somehow I could find my way back.
Then I heard your heart beating, you were in the darkness too.
So I stayed in the darkness with you.”
― Florence Welch Isabella Summers

“With a chaste heart
With pure eyes I celebrate your beauty
Holding the leash of blood
So that it might leap out and trace your outline
Where you lie down in my Ode
As in a land of forests or in surf
In aromatic loam, or in sea music

Beautiful nude
Equally beautiful your feet
Arched by primeval tap of wind or sound
Your ears, small shells
Of the splendid American sea
Your breasts of level plentitude
Fulfilled by living light
Your flying eyelids of wheat
Revealing or enclosing
The two deep countries of your eyes

The line your shoulders have divided into pale regions
Loses itself and blends into the compact halves of an apple
Continues separating your beauty down into two columns of
Burnished gold
Fine alabaster
To sink into the two grapes of your feet
Where your twin symmetrical tree burns again and rises
Flowering fire
Open chandelier
A swelling fruit
Over the pact of sea and earth

From what materials
Agate?
Quartz?
Wheat?
Did your body come together?
Swelling like baking bread to signal silvered hills
The cleavage of one petal
Sweet fruits of a deep velvet
Until alone remained
Astonished
The fine and firm feminine form

It is not only light that falls over the world spreading inside your body
Yet suffocate itself
So much is clarity
Taking its leave of you
As if you were on fire within

The moon lives in the lining of your skin.”
― Pablo Neruda

“But who knows what she spoke to the darkness, alone, in the bitter watches of the night, when all her life seemed shrinking, and the walls of her bower closing in about her, a hutch to trammel some wild thing in?”
― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Return of the King