Tag: poetry

“Aries:
The heat inside you is within your head, a brain like a wildfire and a touch to match. Don’t let your thoughts burn you alive, don’t let people tell you you’re too lively. After all, fire is alive. Unleash it, don’t cage it; it will destroy you.
And I know you own a touch of self destruction, but your fire is not to be dimmed. Don’t let the fire run over your skin and burn you alive, burns will fade but scars will stay. You’re lovable.

Taurus:
The earthy complexion of you is in your throat, your words are calm and your voice makes others find solace within. You easily lull others to sleep, a voice for the screens. Words may tumble of your lips so effortlessly, and earth is oh so rational but look out; earthquakes don’t come with a time ticket.

Gemini:
The air gushes within your arms. Light feather swift movements, an arm around a friends shoulders. You may balance your plates so well, but watch out for obstacles, you don’t want to drop it all. A hug from you may feel like a breeze, you bring solace with a shoulder brush.

Cancer:
Water runs through your hands, a pencil that you know a bit too well. Pen on paper for another soul wrenching piece, maybe your fingers stray the strings of a guitar. You are the rivers, but also the sea; you’re unpredictable and that’s what makes you so dangerously beautiful.

Leo:
Your fire lies in your heart, conflagration. You burn and sow through forests of minds, don’t let anyone eliminate your spark. You’re a leader with twinkling eyes and vodka felt veins. A complexion of ancient treasure, don’t be so hard on yourself. You feel so much, don’t let the fire take you over, but don’t let anyone make it die.

Virgo:
You have earth in your stomach, hands that make dishes to fall in love with. You love food, your gut always tells you what you have to do. Listen, if your gut tells you that something is wrong than please, listen.

Libra:
Air runs through your kidneys, salt and something to let go of. A harmonious cycle with other organs. You create harmony, you let things go. Don’t drink too much water, don’t let people influence you in what to do, salty tears will spill too much. Don’t make yourself stop crying, you will ache too much; let it go.

Scorpio:
Water churns through the pelvis, a heated lover. A compassionate person, someone who needs affection and is intrigued with the dark underlaying nature of humans and human existence. Know you are never to be replaced, for it’s you who will kiss the eyelids of your lover. You trace outlines of constellations on freckles, and it may be imperfect but find someone who looks at you in a way that makes you think perfection isn’t needed, someone who looks at you like are enough. You are enough.

Sagittarius:
Air swirls through your thighs, you have a wandering spirit with a mind that investigates every nook and cranny within your own world map. Your thighs are made to run, so travel, fall in love, and be heartbroken. Experience life, you’re worth the adventure. See it as a mission, and see yourself as goal. Find yourself, it’ll be your biggest travel of all.

Capricorn:
Earthquakes churning through legs made to walk and hike mountains, you may not love sports but you are made to climb. Climb the obstacles and mountains of your life, you have to overcome it. Work hard. You’re enough.

Aquarius:
Air swirls inside your ankles, your made to stand up. Stand up for yourself, for crowds, for others. Stand in front of people, tell your ideas. Stand up. You have a voice, don’t let it falter.

Pisces:
Your feet run on waters, a waterfront of imagination. Don’t run away from your problems love, yes your feet will carry you but you are not God. You need others, you can’t run forever, don’t get lost in your dreams to escape reality. Make reality so good you don’t want to sleep anymore. Live.

Elements in the zodiac (via sodiumforsaltytimes)

When you get older, you notice your sheets are dirty. Sometimes, you do something about it. And sometimes, you read the front page of the newspaper and sometimes you floss and sometimes you stop biting your nails and sometimes you meet a friend for lunch. You still crave lemonade, but the taste doesn’t satisfy you as much as it used to. You still crave summer, but sometimes you mean summer, 5 years ago. You remember your umbrella, you check up on people to see if they got home, you leave places early to go home and make toast. You stand by the toaster in your underwear and a big t-shirt, wondering if you should just turn in or watch one more hour of television. You laugh at different things. You stop laughing at other things. You think about old loves almost like they are in a museum. The socks, you notice, aren’t organized into pairs and you mentally make a note of it. You cover your mouth when you sneeze, reaching for the box of tissues you bought, contains aloe.

When you get older, you try toner, you experiment with trousers, you experiment with real sexy outfits, you experiment with pin curls and darker hair and orange-toned red lipstick and you date people that look good on paper. You kiss them in public and feel only a little self-conscious. You never like them, although sometimes you really do. you think about safe sex and sometimes, kids. You think about plants, maybe succulents, or maybe even a cat?

When you get older, you try different shampoos. You find one you like. You try sleeping early and spin class and jogging again. You try a book you almost read but couldn’t finish. You wrap yourself in the blankets of: familiar t-shirts, caffe au lait, dim tv light, texts with old friends or new people you really want to like and love you. You lose contact with friends from college, and only sometimes you think about it. When you do, it feels bad and almost bitter. You lose people, and when other people bring them up, you almost pretend like you know what they are doing. You try to stop touching your face and become invested in things like expensive salads and trying parsnips and saving up for a vacation you really want. You keep a spare pen in a drawer. You look at old pictures of yourself and they feel foreign and misleading. You forget things like: purchasing stamps, buying more butter, putting lotion on your elbows, calling your mother back. You learn things like balance: checkbooks, social life, work life, time to work out and time to enjoy yourself.

When you get older, you find things like rejection hurt less and things like nostalgia hurt more. You watch people do things you want to do, and then you do some of those things too. Things start to feel like pins on a map. You watch landmarks pass and almost note them. You eat a taco from a food truck and be careful to dab the corners of your mouth with a napkin. You smooth your shirt down. You think about details, the details of how clean the beer cup is, how you need to put the dishes away, how she smells like a perfume you wore and how his teeth are perfect and aligned. You feel a little less downtrodden by things like routine and security and a little more appreciative of things like doing nothing, finding a friend, stretching on a big couch. You hear old songs and only sometimes do they gut you. You think about your future almost always, in both a thrilling way and a very very panicked way.

When you get older, you find yourself more in control. You find your convictions appealing, you find you like your body more, you learn to take things in stride. You begin to crave respect and comfort and adventure, all at the same time. You lay in your bed, fearing death, just like you did.You pull lint off your shirt. You smile less and feel content more. You think about changing and then often, you do.

When you get older, you barely notice it at all. Then, you are sitting somewhere you’ve been before, staring at the nothingness of the sky, and you feel the wind moving away from you, fast and almost impossible to catch.

When You Get Older, thefrenemy (via themindmovement)

featherquillpen:

ecc-poetry:

kranja:

ecc-poetry:

“La sirena y el pescador,” Elisa Chavez.

Hey all! This poem is part of my chapbook Miss Translated, which I produced in a limited run as Town Hall Seattle’s Spring 2017 artist-in-residence. The main conceit behind this work is that to accurately portray my relationship with Spanish, I have to explore the pain and ambiguity of not speaking the language of my grandparents and ancestors. As a result, these poems are bilingual … sort of. Each one is translated into English incorrectly.

The poems I produced have secrets, horrific twists, emotional rants, and confessions hiding in the Spanish. It’s my hope that people can appreciate them regardless of their level of Spanish proficiency.

oh shit.  my spanish is pretty shaky, but i’m pretty sure “te perdono” is “i forgive you.”  wow understanding just that much is pretty chilling.

and something about…blood? and transformation?  oooh yikes.  she didn’t want legs in the spanish version did she.  and it was a painful process.

so this poem is about…misunderstandings leading to pain for the person misunderstood?  whish is really effective with the way it’s written, wow.  this is the most meta poem form i’ve ever seen.  wow.

#reblog#photoset#poetry#i later ran it thru google translate to confirm my theories#won’t post said translation or say how right i was#cuz i feel like that’s missing the point

<— This right here is AMAZING. Look at the journey this person went on reading my poem! Secret fact, I have been stalking tags and reblogs of this because what I wanted more than anything was to provide an experience for people and LOOK AT YOU ALL GO. Your engagement and enthusiasm is amazing and so humbling for me.

Holy crap, this is incredible. As a natively bilingual Latina woman, allow me to dive into a full analysis.

First, I should tell you my experience of reading this. I didn’t even look at the English at first, because I didn’t know that the mistranslation was the point, and of course I didn’t need it. So I read the whole poem in Spanish and thought it was really sad and moving. Then I looked at the English and my eyebrows went right up to my hairline. Why the hell would you translate it this way, I thought. 

Then I read the caption and realized that this is a genius way of demonstrating how translation into English can be an act of colonization and violence.

I would translate the first two lines as “The mermaid rose from the sea / To see the dry world.” They’re very neutral lines. She was curious about the dry world, so she went to check it out. That’s a very different connotation from the mistranslation, which tells you that the mermaid preferred the land to the sea.

The second two lines I would say mean “She found a fisherman on the beach / this beautiful fish without a net.” She’s the one with agency here, not the fisherman, and she thinks of herself as a free fish, unconstrained by a net, not as a fish without a home.

The next three lines by my lights read “She had a gleaming tail; scales / that covered her breasts, arms, and face / and a wake of lacy waves.” Again, it’s from her perspective, not the fisherman’s, and she thinks of herself as having a gleaming rather than oily tail, a lacy wake rather than a frothing one.

Next stanza: “The fisherman caught her by the tail / and cut it in half.” From her point of view, the fisherman has committed a sudden and senseless mutilation. Then he goes, “’Now,’ he said to her, ‘you have legs. / Why don’t you walk?’” It’s almost like an accusation. You have legs now, why don’t you just get up and walk?

My read on the next stanza is: “The mermaid began to sing to the sea / for aid, her blood transforming / the sand of the beach into rainbows.” The sea is her home, not the land, and she’s crying out to her home in pain as she bleeds.

Then the poem ends with “She sang to the fisherman, ‘I forgive you, I forgive you, I forgive you.’”

The reason this mistranslation is so brilliant is that it takes a story about a mermaid trying to forgive a man who’s committed senseless violence against her, and turns it into a story about a man who uplifts a woman to a better life out of the kindness of his heart. And the thing is, that’s exactly what happens to so many stories from colonized cultures when they’re adapted by the oppressor. Translation into English, and further the cultural language of the oppressor, can be an act of violence and erasure rather than one of respect.

This is why I have worked so hard to translate poetry from Spanish to English that has previously only been translated by white Americans who learned Spanish in college. I can bring something to the translation that they can’t. It’s usually not this extreme, but this exists to some degree in all translations by people who don’t truly understand the culture that produced the work they’re translating.

marzipanandminutiae:

feels-for-the-fictional:

satanpositive:

Roses are red, that much is true, but violets are purple, not fucking blue.

I have been waiting for this post all my life.

They are indeed purple,
But one thing you’ve missed:
The concept of “purple”
Didn’t always exist.

Some cultures lack names
For a color, you see.
Hence good old Homer
And his “wine-dark sea.”

A usage so quaint,
A phrasing so old,
For verses of romance
Is sheer fucking gold.

So roses are red.
Violets once were called blue.
I’m hugely pedantic
But what else is new?

It frustrates and fascinates me that we’ll never know for sure, that despite the best efforts of historians and scientists and poets, there are some things we’ll just never know. What the first song sounded like. How it felt to see the first photograph. Who kissed the first kiss, and if it was any good.

Isaac Marion, Warm Bodies


(via historical-nonfiction)

asexualdex:

misbird:

asexualdex:

headcanon that nursey gets one of his poems published in some pretty prestigious paper or something and everyone gathers in the haus to read it and it’s just full of autumn metaphors and anger and longing for someone unattainable. it’s a really fantastic piece of poetry and everyone says so, dex even compliments it and says “wow, you must really like this person”

and you know as soon as nursey and dex leave holster kinda sits there blankly and is like “everyone knows that poem was about dex, right?” and everyone responds like “oh, yeah duh”

Hey @asexualdex I am so sorry here I am again defiling your wonderful headcanon. Anyway I kinda wrote a poem? I ended up combining it with that headcanon floating about with Nursey writing kids books so it is more like, simple, or less modernist (I just feel like Nursey would like modernist poetry. And Woolf. He would love her.) So, again sorry, but here? Pining Nursey poetry?

A Moth

In an autumn’s evening candle light
A love soaked wick burns oh so bright.
And a moth whose heart caries a life dimmed torch
Falls and gets close not caring if his wings get scorched.
Who knows if the light loves him? The moth doesn’t care.
Instead in his own language his soul he lays bare.
He flits, he flutters, he climbs and he dives,
Not knowing he helps his love to thrive.

Life is not perfect, love’s hard to get right,
And even a moth and his light will occasionally fight.
A to hard flap of his wings when they bicker
And his love light will flicker,
A big whoosh from the flame
And a new mark the moth will gain.
But talking after is important and they do that too,
With words like “I’m sorry, you okay?” and “Yes what about you?”

This makes it seem so simple, this earthly plight.
But the moth is no moth, and the light is no light.
And this story is a story and real life is real life.
And on the road to love danger is rife.
So here on a page no longer bare
Is a man not a moth asking his light to let him care.
Let him watch your flame quiver, watch it grow, watch it burn.
Let him choose to scorch his wings when it’s his turn.
For your fire is lovely, ‘tis a fact he knows to be true,
But a moth doesn’t expect a flame to love him like he loves you.

oh my goodness, this is beautiful

wow thank you so much. this is a lovely addition to my post 

oh wow