#ars adjacent

You are not fifteen, or twelve, or seventeen— You are a hundred wild centuries And fifteen, bringing with you In every breath and in every step Everyone who has come before you, All the yous that you have been, The mothers of your mother, The fathers of your father. If someone in your family tree was trouble, A hundred were not: The bad do not win—not finally, No matter how loud they are. We simply would not be here If that were so. You are made, fundamentally, from the good. With this knowledge, you never march alone. You are the breaking news of the century. You are the good who has come forward Through it all, even if so many days Feel otherwise.  But think: When you as a child learned to speak, It’s not that you didn’t know words— It’s that, from the centuries, you knew so many, And it’s hard to choose the words that will be your own. From those centuries we human beings bring with us The simple solutions and songs, The river bridges and star charts and song harmonies All in service to a simple idea: That we can make a house called tomorrow. What we bring, finally, into the new day, every day, Is ourselves.  And that’s all we need To start.  That’s everything we require to keep going. Look back only for as long as you must, Then go forward into the history you will make. Be good, then better.  Write books.  Cure disease. Make us proud.  Make yourself proud. And those who came before you?  When you hear thunder, Hear it as their applause.

I have been standing all my life in the   direct path of a battery of signals the most accurately transmitted most   untranslatable language in the universe I am a galactic cloud so deep      so invo- luted that a light wave could take 15   years to travel through me       And has   taken      I am an instrument in the shape   of a woman trying to translate pulsations   into images    for the relief of the body   and the reconstruction of the mind.

Come out and talk to me           INVITATION for then I know into what you are shaping. Thinking is no more, I read your thoughts for a symbol: a movement towards an act. I give up on thought                             RETHINKING as I see your mind leading into a mystery deepening about you. What are you trying to discover beyond the zone of habit and enforced convention? There is the animus that spends itself on images, the most complex being convention and habit. You shall form patterns                         PRESCRIPTION of research and bind yourself to laws within your knowledge, and always conscious of your limitations make settlement, with patience to instruct you as it always does in your research: an arrangement spanning an abyss of time, and you will find yourself patient when you are questioned.

for Sappho Let my music be found wanting in comparison to yours (as it must) let me be found loving (as you were) extravagantly the beautiful let me find you and the song (forever) between us in these terrible times

I do not understand why men make war. Is it because artillery is the most stoic example of what flesh can become? Is it because the military plan is the final map drawn by the wisest hunter? Is it because the neutron ray is the invincible finger no one will disobey? or Is it because the flood of blood is the proper penance workers must pay for failing tribute at the prescribed hour?

Unfathomable Sea! whose waves are years, Ocean of Time, whose waters of deep woe Are brackish with the salt of human tears! Thou shoreless flood, which in thy ebb and flow Claspest the limits of mortality! And sick of prey, yet howling on for more, Vomitest thy wrecks on its inhospitable shore; Treacherous in calm, and terrible in storm, Who shall put forth on thee, Unfathomable Sea?