Blue Willow Moon

“Night still lingers on. Not quite night, not quite dark. Even as the grey of dawn is prickled by stray dots of brightness, day has not yet quite broken: that otherworldly tinge of dusty in-betweenness stubbornly refuses to dissolve, as though as a reminder that a blur, nothing more, is what stands between life and the drift to a permanent sleep. It is the hour of melancholia, when inward clouds seep out and even the most lustrous of colours are painted dullish blue.”

“Memory takes a lot of poetic license. It omits some details; others are exaggerated, according to the emotional value of the articles it touches, for memory is seated predominantly in the heart. The interior is therefore rather dim and poetic.”

“For the loss of my life.

“You are my hiraeth. And I, your forsaken ghost—the unlived life,”

evening unfolds

“Do not wait

“I still remember

“Every act of writing is an excursion into memory. This is especially true of poetry. Make sure that it’s your memory into which you travel, and not someone else’s. Even if the events in the poem involve an invented character, the emotions surrounding what happens and what the imagination does with those events must come from your own history of abuse or contentment, faith or uncertainty, and no one else’s. Let the poem know what you’ve learned in your life.”

“All day a sword in my heart

“what of the irresolution of nights on backporches as love spirals down all around you,”

“The cicadas paused at his very thought of her, as if they, too, could not tell her how they felt.”