“A pointed word, once it is spoken or written, cannot be cut away with an axe.”
– Nikolai Gogol in Dead Souls
A Tender Point
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Author Archives: aperture
Alive
“I like birthdays. I like them more for other people, but I’m glad we celebrate them. At the heart of it is the opportunity to tell someone “I’m glad that you were born,” which is also to say “I’m glad that you’re alive.” Those are powerful statements. The world would be a different place if we lived that way, if we said and expressed these things, more than once a year.”
– jamie tworkowski If You Feel Too Much (TWLOHA)
Seasoned
Sound advice
mere human
dose taken
measure of salt
from bedrock
only reason
good taste
nor revolt
salt of earth
are we
spread to nourish
cover over
unpleasantness
foul taste and toil
measured out
abundantly
one good recipe
let us not
lose our saltiness
lest we all
may spoil
Image – Salt mine worker
Take Heart
Some stories better left untold
Others build us prison walls
but when uttered they dissolve
unchained altar call
Like a caged bird flapping
fighting endlessly
Decides to sing its heart song
then gentle hands set free.
Poem inspired by:
Prison Fellowship of Australia – Art from Inside Project
Grafted
Ever since our lives entwined / Grafted to the noble vine / Wondered whether we’d survive / The peeling bark of time
For Whom the Bell Tolls
“All mankind is of one author, and is one volume;
when one man dies, one chapter is not torn out of the book,
but translated into a better language;
and every chapter must be so translated;
God employs several translators;
some pieces are translated by age,
some by sickness, some by war, some by justice;
but God’s hand is in every translation,
and his hand shall bind up all our scattered leaves
again for that library where every book
shall lie open to one another.
No man is an island, entire of itself;
every man is a piece of the continent,
a part of the main…
any man’s death diminishes me,
because I am involved in mankind,
and therefore never send to know
for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.
No man hath affliction enough
that is not matured and ripened by it,
and made fit for God by that affliction.”
Meditation #17 By John Donne From Devotions upon Emergent Occasions (1623), XVII:
Nunc Lento Sonitu Dicunt, Morieris (Now this bell, tolling softly for another, says to me, Thou must die.)
One
It’s easy for the enemy
to strike at the heart of me
when I wear it on my sleeve
So rather than hiding it
I cover with
amour mesh of steel
righteousness, no do-good
but right feelings, intentions
thoughts, beliefs.
Devotions to
One
One-self
One-another
Nothing else matters
Seed of Creativity
A quote from Dubliners by James Joyce in “A Little Cloud”
“A light began to tremble on the horizon of his mind…
He tried to weigh his soul to see if it was a poet’s soul. Melancholy was the dominant note of his temperament, he thought, but it was a melancholy tempered by recurrences of faith and resignation and simple joy.”
Present Joy
Quote from Dubliners by James Joyce in “A Little Cloud”
“He picked his way deftly through all that minute verminlike life and under the shadow of the gaunt spectral mansions in which the old nobility of Dublin had roistered.
No memory of the past touched him, for his mind was full of a present joy.”
Contentment
Quote from Dubliners by James Joyce in “Two Gallants”
“He thought how pleasant it would be to have a warm fire to sit by and a good dinner to sit down to. He had walked the streets long enough with friends and with girls. He knew what those friends were worth: he knew the girls too.
Experience had embittered his heart against the world.
But all hope had not left him. He felt better after having eaten than he had felt before, less weary of his life, less vanquished in spirit.”
