A Piece of the Storm

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From the shadow of domes in the city of domes,
A snowflake, a blizzard of one, weightless, entered your room
And made its way to the arm of the chair where you, looking up
From your book, saw it the moment it landed. That’s all
There was to it. No more than a solemn waking
To brevity, to the lifting and falling away of attention, swiftly,
A time between times, a flowerless funeral. No more than that
Except for the feeling that this piece of the storm,
Which turned into nothing before your eyes, would come back,
That someone years hence, sitting as you are now, might say:
“It’s time. The air is ready. The sky has an opening.


–Mark Strand

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we are all just walking each other home –Ram Das

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Strange and beautiful
Are the stars tonight
That dance around your head
In your eyes I see that perfect world
I hope that doesn't sound too weird

And I want all the world to know
That your love's all I need
All that I need
And if we're lost
Then we are lost together
Yea if we're lost
Then we are lost together

I stand before this faceless crowd
And I wonder why I bother
So much controlled by so few
Stumbling from one disaster to another

I've heard it all so many times before
It's all a dream to me now
A dream to me now
And if we're lost
Then we are lost together
Yea if we're lost
Then we are lost together

In the silence of this whispered night
I listen only to your breath
And that second of a shooting star
Somehow it all makes sense

And I want all the world to know
That your love's all I need
All that I need
And if we're lost
Then we are lost together
Yea if we're lost
Then we are lost together 

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Ahead By A Century

First thing we'd climb a tree and maybe then we'd talk

Or sit silently and listen to our thoughts
With illusions of someday casting a golden light
No dress rehearsal, this is our life
And that's where the hornet stung me
And I had a feverish dream
With revenge and doubt
Tonight we smoke them out
You are ahead by a century (this is our life)
You are ahead by a century (this is our life)
You are ahead by a century
Stare in the morning shroud and then the day began
I tilted your cloud, you tilted my hand
Rain falls in real time and rain fell through the night
No dress rehearsal, this is our life
But that's when the hornet stung me
And I had a serious dream
With revenge and doubt
Tonight we smoke them out
You are ahead by a century (this is our life)
You are ahead by a century (this is our life)
You are ahead by a century
You are ahead by a century (this is our life)
You are ahead by a century (this is our life)
You are ahead by a century
And disappointing you is getting me down

💗

you alone

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All men have stars, but they are not the same things for different people. For some, who are travelers, the stars are guides. For others they are no more than little lights in the sky. For others, who are scholars, they are problems… 

But all these stars are silent. You-You alone will have stars as no one else has them… 

In one of the stars I shall be living. In one of them I shall be laughing. And so it will be as if all the stars will be laughing when you look at the sky at night...

You, only you, will have stars that can laugh! And when your sorrow is comforted (time soothes all sorrows) you will be content that you have known me… 

You will always be my friend. You will want to laugh with me. And you will sometimes open your window, so, for that pleasure… 

It will be as if, in place of the stars, I had given you a great number of little bells that knew how to laugh.


—Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

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a night fragrance

 

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Now I am old enough to remember
people speaking of immortality
as though it were something known to exist
a tangible substance that might be acquired
to be used perhaps in the kitchen
every day in whatever was made there
forever after and they applied the word
to literature and the names of things
names of persons and the naming of other
things for them and no doubt they repeated
that word with some element of belief
when they named a genus of somewhat more than
a hundred species of tropical trees and shrubs
some with flowers most fragrant at night
for James Theodore Tabernaemontanus
of Heidelberg physician and botanist
highly regarded in his day over
four centuries ago immortality
might be like that with the scattered species
continuing their various evolutions
the flowers opening by day or night
with no knowledge of bearing a name
of anyone and their fragrance if it
reminds at all not reminding of him


—W.S. Merwin

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question

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What is it that you contain? The dead. Time. Light patterns of millennia opening in your gut. 

Every minute, in each of you, a few million potassium atoms succumb to radioactive decay. The energy that powers these tiny atomic events has been locked inside potassium atoms ever since a star-sized bomb exploded nothing into being. 

Potassium, like uranium and radium, is a long-lived radioactive nuclear waste of the supernova bang that accounts for you.

Your first parent was a star.


–Jeanette Winterson

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you can be generous

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No, no, there is no going back.
Less and less you are
that possibility you were.
More and more you have become
those lives and deaths
that have belonged to you.
You have become a sort of grave
containing much that was
and is no more in time, beloved
then, now, and always.
And so you have become a sort of tree
standing over the grave.
Now more than ever you can be
generous toward each day
that comes, young, to disappear
forever, and yet remain
unaging in the mind.
Every day you have less reason
not to give yourself away.


–Wendell Berry
A Timbered Choir: The Sabbath Poems

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this cloud is learning

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Death has nothing to do with going away.

The sun sets, the moon sets.
But they are not gone.

–Rumi

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Jean Marc Caimi
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