sagewraith

[sagewraith]

She hummed softly as I read, and my words became many small boats rocking on the tiny pulses of her voice.

Li-Young Lee, "The Invention of the Darling" from The Invention of the Darling

[sagewraith]

Rodney Terich Leonard, "The Music That Learns Us" from Sweetgum & Lightning

[sagewraith]

Strange, isn’t it, how the greatest disasters in history often feel hollow and abstract, like distant thunder? A single death, wrote one ancient king, is a tragedy, but a genocide can only be understood through statistics.

Christopher Ruocchio, Empire of Silence

[sagewraith]

They were allowed only the pursuits of the mind, and so books—which are to thoughts as amber to the captured fly—were their greatest treasures.

Christopher Ruocchio, Empire of Silence

[sagewraith]

“Knowledge is the mother of fools,” he said. “Remember, the greatest part of wisdom in recognizing your own ignorance.”

Christopher Ruocchio, Empire of Silence

[sagewraith]

Moon-shimmer on leaves and trellises,

Moon-spikes shafting through the snow ball bush.

The Garden by Moonlight, Amy Lowell

[sagewraith]

The garden is very still,

It is dazed with moonlight,

Contented with perfume,

The Garden by Moonlight, Amy Lowell

[sagewraith]

Zehra Naqvi, from The Knot of My Tongue: Poems and Prose; “Brothers (II)”

[sagewraith]

“All those severe poets talking big about the wages of sin all the time,” Zee added, “but nobody ever brought up the wages of virtue. The toll of trying really really hard to be good in a game that’s totally rigged against goodness.”

Kaveh Akbar, Martyr!

[sagewraith]

It was almost unbearable, how good and warm it felt to be there—together—in the pond’s golden light. The feeling of prayer—not prayer itself, but the stillness it leaves—lifted from the earth, smelling of grass and woodsmoke.

Kaveh Akbar, Martyr!

[sagewraith]

The sea is in me. I feel its deep currents running in my veins. Pulsing and throbbing. Constantly.

Priya Hein, Riambel

[sagewraith]

Sometimes when I look out at the ocean, I want to swim as far towards the horizon as I can manage.

Priya Hein, Riambel

[sagewraith]

Music is as eternal as the universe, it is part of its very fabric, and a musician is only picking at a small corner of the universe, a tiny dot in it, when they turn air and time into sound. A musician’s task is not to create sound from nothingness; a true musician understands that music is the primordial state of the universe, the very first world, and silence is a cloak imposed upon this state, and a musician’s job is to create a tear in that cloak to let out the music underneath.

Anton Hur, Toward Eternity

[sagewraith]

I watch leaves flip in the air— their yellow bodies hover and float, almost motionless above the concrete before a final collapse, a hundred tiny Icaruses.

Sierra DeMulder, "Driving through Pennsylvania in Autumn" from Ephemera

[sagewraith]

I am the last spell, the only song left. deliberate utterance of bone.

Ina Cariño, "Names are spells, & I have four—" from Feast

[sagewraith]

The wind’s voice changed, became harsher, colder. It began to smell of sea instead of light-soaked stone or earth. The moon grew full, then slowly pared itself down until it shriveled into a ghostly boat riding above the roiling dark

Song for the Basilisk, Patricia A. McKillip

[sagewraith]

Earlier that summer in Dacia the scribe Euan Ash, translating a poem out of a long-dead language, was lulled by bees and the scent of sun-warmed roses into a dream of the poem. His eyes closed. The ragged breathings and scratchings from dozens of noses and pens, the occasional curse let loose as gently as a filament of spiderweb, faded around him. He walked down a dusty road in a strange dry landscape, eating a handful of stones. In that land, stones turned to words in the mouth. Words tasted like honey, like blood; they vibrated with insect wings between the teeth.

Patricia A. McKillip, In the Forests of Serre