I Don’t Know Where I’m Going. Where I Came From Is Disappearing. I Am Unwelcome. My Beauty Is Not

George Seferis, tr. by Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard, from The Collected Poems 1924-1955; “And if the soul”

“Death is woven in with the violets…”

— Virginia Woolf, from ‘The Waves’

Mackenzie Herbert, Chasing Trains // Artwork by @/archbudzar on ig // Vera Nazarian, The Perpetual Calendar of Inspiration // Lana M.H. Wilder

I’ve just finished reading The Girl Who Chased the Moon and magic realism is my new favourite thing - historical fantasy has always been my lane, but I’m definitely branching out. I have already ordered some more of Sarah Addison Allen’s books and I’m thinking of making a list of some more magical realism books. Recommendations are welcome!

Thursday, 8th July 2021

There is freedom in the shadowed storm as the veil-wrapped sky billows in a climbing release. I lay here on the rough strewn ground, a wilderness of rain-kissed grass, tumbled yarn, and loose cut threads. Find me in the running lake carving eyes into the overgrown path, lost to the planted sky now curling into a silver smile.

Freedom is more than just running through the rain on Thursday afternoons.

Blossom

A ghost is perched in the middle of the lane

softly swaying in a dull grey wind;

she has bloomed but now is still

full of ghostly feathers, like cotton

sheets fresh and waiting,

a new woven straw hat 

balanced on the crowded brass hook,

pillows of clouds and endless days

with no rain but the grass is dewy eyed 

and lost in a trailing book,

flyaways cutting a boundless sight,

some days are long and grey 

but then the nights --

           -- the blossom tree outside my window

tells me when spring is here

yet it is wasted in a silent darkness

softly perched in the middle of the lane,

feathers orange in the glow of a thousand sunsets

waiting to be seen again

untitled

and one fine morning, i float away; drifting into that azure emptiness

I ache for the world and I run away from it

I seek a truth only a breadth away from mine

D.L. Smith