Robert Frost – Home Burial

“The nearest friends can go with anyone to death, comes so far short they might as well not try to go at all.”

Paul Celan – Love Crown

“It is time that the stone let itself break into flower, that the unresting heart beat.”

Rainer Maria Rilke – Requiem for a Friend

“For somewhere there is an ancient enmity between our daily life and the great work. Help me, in saying it, to understand it.”

Pádraig Ó Tuama – The Facts of Life

“That you will sometimes love enough and sometimes not.”

Eloisa Amezcua – The Witch Reads Me My Birthchart

“she says the planets & stars show that I’m too good at being alone”

Momtaza Mehri – Reciprocity is a Two-Way Street

“Eventually, you’ll have to stop impersonating a skimmed stone.
There are other ways of parting”

Hallie Knight – To Rebuild

“Remembering the mistakes, maintaining the hope of freedom,
hand in hand, we work, entering a new season. “

Derek Walcott – The Sea is History

“Sir, it is locked in the sea-sands
out there past the reef’s moiling shelf, where the man-o-wars floated down”

Hala Alyan – Object Permanence

“There are things I like about heartbreak, too, how it needs
a good soundtrack. “

Leila Chatti – After Touching You, I Think of Narcissus Drowning

“I have writhed against you as if against the black bottom of a deep pool”

Rainer Maria Rilke – Go to the Limits of Your Longing

“God speaks to each of us as he makes us, then walks with us silently out of the night”

Raymond Carver – In the Year 2020

“Which of us will be left then–
old, dazed, unclear–but willing to talk about our dead friends?”