Sometimes

Sometimes

by Mary Oliver

I.

Something came up out of the dark. It wasn’t anything I had ever seen before. It wasn’t an animal or a flower, unless it was both.

Something came up out of the water, a head the size of a cat but muddy and without ears. I don’t know what God is. I don’t know what death is.

But I believe they have between them some fervent and necessary arrangement.

II.

Sometimes melancholy leaves me breathless…

III.

Water from the heavens! Electricity from the source! Both of them mad to create something!

The lighting brighter than any flower. The thunder without a drowsy bone in its body.

IV.

Instructions for living a life: Pay attention. Be astonished. Tell about it.

V. Two or three times in my life I discovered love. Each time it seemed to solve everything. Each time it solved a great many things but not everything. Yet left me as grateful as if it had indeed, and thoroughly, solved everything.

VI.

God, rest in my heart and fortify me, take away my hunger for answers, let the hours play upon my body

like the hands of my beloved. Let the cathead appear again — the smallest of your mysteries, some wild cousin of my own blood probably — some cousin of my own wild blood probably, in the black dinner-bowl of the pond.

VII.

Death waits for me, I know it, around one corner or another. This doesn’t amuse me. Neither does it frighten me.

After the rain, I went back into the field of sunflowers. It was cool, and I was anything but drowsy. I walked slowly, and listened

to the crazy roots, in the drenched earth, laughing and growing.

More Posts from Rainlyn and Others

7 months ago
By August, we are sluggish with love and slide two
barrettes into the night of my hair. Like twin fireflies.
Like rabbit feet dyed blue and downhearted, stamping
the side of my head. July’s shadow is almost rot
and we haven’t spoken in days. I play pool with Mik
and count the ways he sinks ball after ball while I await
the doom of going second, soon regret letting him break.
I bet on this game. I bet on the waning of light, fame. I know
most things dim. It’s hot when I leave the bar and I say
Come, sun, you muscular star, thinking heatstroke
might strike this state of weather from my heart.
The trigger of seasons, the treasons of these city streets.
Orchard and Broome. We loom. We make reasons and room
for why things can’t work; we lurk into autumn.
We warm our hands for October’s plume. We say soon, soon,
soon something will be revealed. We fool no one
and are no one’s fool, least of all the late summer gods
who know a burn, who rope in hope, who prepare us
for a meal of dead light. In August, I want snow. I want July.
Midsummer prophet sight. Belief. Faith. A cathedral
with all her weight. A winter love. A new year.
A regal infancy. A Sunday, born.

may to december by Megan Fernandes


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5 months ago
rainlyn - violets came and daffodils
7 months ago

hey just so you know the harder i swim the faster i sink if you even care

7 months ago
rainlyn - violets came and daffodils

Virginia Woolf, To The Lighthouse


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5 months ago

oh to be immortal and be able to consume every piece of knowledge and literature ever

7 months ago

Frida Kahlo to Marty McConnell

by Marty McConnell

leaving is not enough; you must stay gone. train your heart like a dog. change the locks even on the house he’s never visited. you lucky, lucky girl. you have an apartment just your size. a bathtub full of tea. a heart the size of Arizona, but not nearly so arid. don’t wish away your cracked past, your crooked toes, your problems are papier mache puppets you made or bought because the vendor at the market was so compelling you just had to have them. you had to have him. and you did. and now you pull down the bridge between your houses. you make him call before he visits. you take a lover for granted, you take a lover who looks at you like maybe you are magic. make the first bottle you consume in this place a relic. place it on whatever altar you fashion with a knife and five cranberries. don’t lose too much weight. stupid girls are always trying to disappear as revenge. and you are not stupid. you loved a man with more hands than a parade of beggars, and here you stand. heart like a four-poster bed. heart like a canvas. heart leaking something so strong they can smell it in the street.


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7 months ago

I’M GOING BACK TO MINNESOTA WHERE SADNESS MAKES SENSE

by Danez Smith

O California, don’t you know the sun is only a god if you learn to starve for him? I’m bored with the ocean I stood at the lip of it, dressed in down, praying for snow I know, I’m strange, too much light makes me nervous at least in this land where the trees always bear green. I know something that doesn’t die can’t be beautiful. Have you ever stood on a frozen lake, California? The sun above you, the snow & stalled sea — a field of mirror all demanding to be the sun too, everything around you is light & it’s gorgeous & if you stay too long it will kill you & it’s so sad, you know? You’re the only warm thing for miles & the only thing that can’t shine.


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7 months ago
rainlyn - violets came and daffodils
7 months ago

"Friends dont look at friends that way" COWARD. I look at my friends with awe in my eyes, my chest is filled with love, im glowing because i get to be near my friends. I look at my friends and i would give them my everything. SO SKILL ISSUE, look at your friends with all the love that you have


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yes
3 months ago
Love Poem Beginning with a Yellow Cab
                            for Erika

i ask you what’s the first thing you think about
when you see the color yellow & like a real
new yorker, you say yellow cabs. not sunlight
or a yellow ribbon tied around a vase of fresh begonias.
yellow cabs honking down Broadway. i still remember
the night we first shared a cab. you whispered
honey, whispered lace, whispered chrysanthemum.
all that practice & it turns out, i had never ridden
in a cab the right way. around us the streetlights blurred
into yellow ribbons, & when you put your hand
on my thigh it was like i knew for the first time
why god gave us thighs. why god gave us hands.
maybe god invented yellow for the cabs,
so the first time we touched like this
it could be accented in gold.

love poem beginning with a yellow cab by José Olivarez


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rainlyn - violets came and daffodils
violets came and daffodils

rita! just reblogging poetry

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