Month: July 2014

“what they did yesterday afternoon” by Warsan Shire

On By Christina's WordsIn Poetry

they set my aunts house on fire
i cried the way women on tv do
folding at the middle
like a five pound note.
i called the boy who used to love me
tried to ‘okay’ my voice
i said hello
he said warsan, what’s wrong, what’s happened?

 
i’ve been praying,
and these are what my prayers look like;
dear god
i come from two countries
one is thirsty
the other is on fire
both need water.

 
later that night
i held an atlas in my lap
ran my fingers across the whole world
and whispered
where does it hurt?
 

it answered
everywhere
everywhere
everywhere.

.
“what they did yesterday afternoon” by Warsan Shire

 

“If the book we are reading does not wake us …

On By Christina's WordsIn Quote1 Comment

“If the book we are reading does not wake us, as with a fist hammering on our skull, why then do we read? So that it shall make us happy? Good God, we should also be happy if we had no books, and such books as make us happy we could, if need be, write ourselves. But what we must have are those books which come upon us like ill fortune, and distress us deeply, like the death of one we love better than ourselves; like suicide. A book must be an ice-axe to break the sea frozen inside us.” ~ Franz Kafka

“The Living End” by Samuel Menashe

On By Christina's WordsIn Poetry
Before long the end
Of the beginning
Begins to bend
To the beginning
Of the end you live
With some misgivings
About what you did.
.

Samuel Menashe, “The Living End” from Samuel Menashe: New and Selected Poems, edited by Christopher Ricks, published by The Library of America, 2005. Copyright © 2004 by Samuel Menashe.

“Whoever you are, now I place my hand upon you …

On By Christina's WordsIn Poetry, Quote

“Whoever you are, now I place my hand upon you
That you may be my poem,
I whisper with my lips close to your ear,
I have loved many women and men, but I love none better than you.”

– Walt Whitman, from “To You” in Leaves of Grass

“Late Fragment” by Raymond Carver

On By Christina's WordsIn Poetry10 Comments

And did you get what
you wanted from this life, even so?
I did.
And what did you want?
To call myself beloved, to feel myself
beloved on the earth.

“Late Fragment” by Raymond Carver From A New Path to the Waterfall, Atlantic Monthly Press, 1989.

* Related: “HOW POEMS WORK: Late Fragment by Raymond Carver” poem analysis and article by AISLINN HUNTER. From that article:

Late Fragment is the final poem in the poet and short story writer Raymond Carver’s (1938-1988) last published work, A New Path to the Waterfall, a collection that was written while he was dying of cancer. I value the Carver poem for a number of reasons. Mostly, I admire its simplicity and its poignancy. There is no measure of irony or artifice in it. There is also an underlying sense of celebration — this, in the affirmative “I did” and in the realization that when all is said and done, to call oneself beloved and to feel oneself beloved (a kind of proof) is enough.