ALTRebecca Perry, Beauty/Beauty; from 'Kintsugi 金継ぎ'
Once I’d seen him stand behind
my mother’s market stall when a woman held
up a necklace my mother made, and ask him
how much it was, and he turned to my mother,
said Rose? And he said it like something in him
grew towards the light.
— Raymond Antrobus, from "Arose," All the Names Given
“Sacred poetry is transformative poetry. No matter how much we think we have understood, until we feel a poem working its alchemy on our own awareness, we haven’t yet met the heart of the poem.”
— Ivan M. Granger, from The Longing in Between: Sacred Poetry from Around the World (Poetry Chaikhana, 2014)
Tears gathered in his eyes and he blinked to release them. They were large still tears such as men weep in solitude over beautiful things. To weep like that over a human being was a most desolate homage.
– Iris Murdoch, The Unicorn
(Chatto & Windus, 1963)
“I don’t want you to leave, heartache, the last form of loving. I feel myself live when you hurt me not in yourself, or here, but further: in the earth, in the year you come from, in my love for her and everything it meant. In that sunken reality which denies itself and insists that it never existed, that it was only a pretext of mine for living. If you didn’t stay with me, heartache, irrefutably, I would believe that; but you do stay with me. Your truth assures me that nothing was a lie. And as long as I feel you, heartache, you will be the proof of another life in which you didn’t hurt me. The great proof, in the distance, that it existed, that it still exists, that she loved me, yes, that I’m still loving her.”
— Pedro Salinas, from “The Voice I Owe to You,” Memory in My Hands: The Love Poetry of Pedro Salinas (Peter Lang Inc., International Academic Publishers, 2009)
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