The cities are falling asleep, each in its house

(In my sleep I dreamed this poem)

Someone I loved once gave me

a box of darkness.

It took me years to understand

that this, too, was a gift.

-Mary Oliver

Image: Dmitry Anisimov 
Title: Czeslaw Milosz, from The Separate Notebooks

We are what suns and winds and waters make us

Image: Richard Leach, 7 Words, Distressed page from old poetry book on playing card.


Title: Found in The Poems of Algernon Charles Swinburne, 1904

Accepting that blur

so knowing,
what is known?
that we carry our baggage
in our cupped hands
when we burst through
the waters of our mother.
that some are born
and some are brought
to the glory of this world.
that it is more difficult
than faith
to serve only one calling
one commitment
one devotion
in one life.
-Lucille Clifton, “Far Memory”

Image: Giovanni Boccaccio
Title: Ruth Stone

Under the tall sky of hope

the weight of this stone is longing
the curve of that tree is longing
and longing makes the lightest breeze
sigh in the tall dead bracken
-Thomas A. Clark, from “At Dusk & At Dawn”, The Path to the Sea

Image: Sibley Colliery, Pennsylvania, 1886
Title: Marin Sorescu

Say what you see in the dark

There were once words here,
now they are lost.
 
Fear, that ghost.
 
-Terresa Wellborn

And this:

"Throw away the light, the definitions, and say what you see in the dark."

-Wallace Stevens

Image: Katia Chausheva