Yasmin

“The man becomes a web
and his shadow becomes a spider.

It’s not that his life passes to the shadow—
but a tipping happens
as in an hourglass,

and there’s suddenly a new order
to the life he never knew was shared.

That night a cricket kills himself in the man.”
― Max Ritvo

“Cocoon

cocooned in
winter white
I slip beside you
breathe deep

if you listen
you can hear the snow
change
shift slow to spring
poised for melt

cloaked under
white winter
I lie beside you
breathe out

if you listen
you can hear
wet wings unfurl
like petals
ready to be
born”
― Katherena Vermette, River Woman

“My library was -- all libraries are -- a place of ultimate refuge, a wild and sacred space where meanings are manageable precisely because they aren't binding; and where illusion is comfortingly real.”
― André Brink

“One day in March AD 415, Hypatia set out from her home to go for her daily ride through the city. Suddenly, she found her way blocked by a “multitude of believers in God.”32 They ordered her to get down from her chariot. Knowing what had recently happened to her friend Orestes, she must have realized as she climbed down that her situation was a serious one. She cannot possibly have realized quite how serious. As soon as she stood on the street, the parabalani, under the guidance of a Church magistrate called Peter—“a perfect believer in all respects in Jesus Christ”33—surged round and seized “the pagan woman.” They then dragged Alexandria’s greatest living mathematician through the streets to a church. Once inside, they ripped the clothes from her body and, using broken pieces of pottery as blades, flayed her skin from her flesh. Some say that, while she still gasped for breath, they gouged out her eyes. Once she was dead, they tore her body into pieces and threw what was left of the “luminous child of reason” onto a pyre and burned her.34”
― Catherine Nixey, The Darkening Age: The Christian Destruction of the Classical World