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Ada Limón, “To Be Made Whole”, On Being with Krista Tippett

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I turn my rage into art because letting shit go is overrated. Immortalize this shit. This shit pulled Soxxx back out of their hole

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Your pain lives in me like a cancer

But I will be kind

I will stay gentle

I will persist

It is my prayers that protect you.

It is my mercy that protects you.

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I turn my rage into art because letting shit go is overrated. Immortalize this shit. This shit pulled Soxxx back out of their hole

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"May thy riot gear chip and shatter"

Seen inside the occupied Portland State University library, where student protesters are preparing for a police raid

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“So, if you are too tired to speak, sit next to me for I, too, am fluent in silence.”

— R. Arnold 

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I cannot stop the words from pouring from my lips like water bursting through rusted pipes

I love you

I say it over and over and I worry the words will become meaningless when they fall upon your ears

But I simply

Cannot

Stop them

From spilling.

Time and time again.

Like a desperate child

But maybe.

In a way

That is why.

I was a desperate child.

Who begged,

And pleaded,

And folded myself into the neat

Tiny space

So I would not be in the way

Would not take up space

I would have cut out my own tongue

To silence myself

If it meant that he would love me

Would hold me

Would tuck me into my bed

Kiss my forehead

And tell me goodnight.

I went days without food

I went years without love

Living on scraps and convincing myself that the scraps I got

The abuse, I received

Was not just, enough for me

But was

Love.

That the gnawing hunger in my bones

For more,

Was silly

Was a child’s fantasy

And yet

Here you are

Loving me

In this way I do not understand

You do not silence me

You do not shrink me

You watch me dance

You make me laugh

You reached into that dark cramped place and you pulled me into the light

You breathed life into these tired bones and suddenly the fires of my rage

Changed

Softened

And I realized it was never rage

It was grief

The love that you show me

The patience

The kindness

The encouragement

I am in mourning.

You tell me that I do not burden you when I need your love.

That loving me is not a chore.

It is easy.

It was never a silly child’s fantasy.

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“I need a father, I need a mother, I need some older, wiser being to cry to. I talk to God but the sky is empty.”

— Sylvia Plath, from The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath  (via plathisms)

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Sorry in advance. Bonus points can you name the others? — view on Instagram https://ift.tt/JZrAvxF

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of all the things you could've been doing, you picked up the phone and you asked for help.

I have lived long enough, to be the person I needed when I was young, for someone else.

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I finished my Rome book and have now begun one about Pompeii. I’m 65 pages in and I already love it: yes, it covers the volcano, but most of the book is about “this is what the town and daily life of it would have been like, actually.” Fascinating stuff. Things I’ve learned so far:

- The streets in Pompeii have sidewalks sometimes a meter higher than the road, with stepping stones to hop across as “crosswalks.” I’d seen some photos before. The book points out that, duh, Pompeii had no underground drainage, was built on a fairly steep incline, and the roads were more or less drainage systems and water channels in the rain.

- Unlike today, where “dining out” is expensive and considered wasteful on a budget, most people in Pompeii straight up didn’t have kitchens. You had to eat out if you were poor; only the wealthy could afford to eat at home.

- Most importantly, and I can’t believe in all the pop culture of Pompeii this had never clicked for me: Pompeii had a population between 6-35,000 people. Perhaps 2,000 died in the volcano. Contemporary sources talk about the bay being full of fleeing ships. Most people got the hell out when the eruption started. The number who died are still a lot, and it’s still gruesome and morbid, but it’s not “an entire town and everyone in it.” This also makes it difficult for archeologists, apparently (and logically): those who remained weren’t acting “normally,” they were sheltering or fleeing a volcano. One famous example is a wealthy woman covered in jewelry found in the bedroom in the glaridator barracks. Scandal! She must have been having an affair and had it immortalized in ash! The book points out that 17 other people and several dogs were also crowded in that one small room: far more likely, they were all trying to shelter together. Another example: Houses are weirdly devoid of furniture, and archeologists find objects in odd places. (Gardening supplies in a formal dining room, for example.) But then you remember that there were several hours of people evacuating, packing their belongings, loading up carts and getting out… maybe the gardening supplies were brought to the dining room to be packed and abandoned, instead of some deeper esoteric meaning. The book argues that this all makes it much harder to get an accurate read on normal life in a Roman town, because while Pompeii is a brilliant snapshot, it’s actually a snapshot of a town undergoing major evacuation and disaster, not an average day.

- Oh, another great one. Outside of a random laundry place in Pompeii, someone painted a mural with two scenes. One of them referenced Virgil’s Aeneid. Underneath that scene, someone graffiti’d a reference to a famous line from that play, except tweaked it to be about laundry. This is really cool, the book points out, because it implies that a) literacy and education was high enough that one could paint a reference and have it recognized, and b) that someone else could recognize it and make a dumb play on words about it and c) the whole thing, again, means that there’s a certain amount of literacy and familiarity with “Roman pop culture” even among fairly normal people at the time.

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I need something beautiful

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I think authors underestimate how many people reread their works/chapters.

That’s why, when I’m rereading WIPs or old works, I always leave a comment. Just a little hey, I’m rereading this and it is still great goes so far, actually

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…

@mazeirons