in the early hours
of morning
before the call to prayer
you enter my dreams
and I wake
your phantom presence
next to me
a morning ritual
the aching
in my heart
Author: zdunno03
Coming Upon Mount Wu Yi by Li Shang Yin (c.813-858)
translated from the Chinese by Mary Tang on her blog Life is But This
one more link
there they are
in address books
on cell phones
scraps of paper
stuck between pages
of books
read long ago
names sometimes
attached
though often
on those scraps of paper
missing
or incomplete
and one is left
trying to remember
faces
personalities
quirks in speech
hesitating
as one often does
deleting
those old phone numbers
putting off
‘til another day
erasing one more link
to a life
the opening paragraph of The Way Some People Die by Ross Macdonald
The house was in Santa Monica on a cross street between the boulevards, within earshot of the coast highway and rifleshot of the sea. The street was the kind that people had once been proud to live on, but in the last few years it had lost its claim to pride. The houses had too many stories, too few windows, not enough paint. Their history was easy to guess: they were one-family residences broken up into apartments and light-housekeeping rooms, or converted into tourist homes. Even the palms that lined the street looked as if they had seen their best days and were starting to lose their hair.
Bright Moon, When Did You Appear? by Su Tung-p’o
Bright moon, when did you appear?
Lifting my wine, I question the blue sky.
Tonight in the palaces and halls of heaven
what year is it, I wonder?
I would like to ride the wind, make my home there,
only I fear porphyry towers, under jade eaves,
in those high places the cold wind would be more than I could bear.
So I rise and dance and play in your pure beams,
though this human world–how can it vie with yours?
Circling red chambers,
low in the curtained door,
you light our sleeplessness.
Surely you bear us no ill will–
why then must you be so round at times when we humans are parted!
People have their griefs and joys, their togetherness and separation,
the moon its dark and clear times, its roundings and wanings.
I only hope we two may have long long lives,
may share the moon’s beauty, though a thousand miles apart.
translated by Burton Watson
“Art… is the one orderly product which our middling race has produced… it is the lighthouse which cannot be hidden”
from Douglas Moore’s Art of Quotation
“Art for art’s sake? I should think so, and more so than ever at the present time. It is the one orderly product which our middling race has produced.
It is the cry of a thousand sentinels, the echo from a thousand labyrinths, it is the lighthouse which cannot be hidden. It is the best evidence we can have of our dignity.”
“Books are lighthouses erected in the great sea of time.”
from Douglas Moore’s Art of Quotation
“Books are lighthouses erected in the great sea of time.”
Edwin Percy Whipple, essayist, critic
from Drinking Wine by Su Tung-p’o
Free the mind–let it move with the world
and doubt nothing it finds there!
In wine I stumbled on unexpected joy.
Now I always have an empty cup in hand.
translated by Burton Watson
“In a room where people unanimously maintain a conspiracy of silence, one word of truth sounds like a pistol shot.”
from Douglas Moore’s blog Art of Quotation
“In a room where people unanimously maintain a conspiracy of silence, one word of truth sounds like a pistol shot.”
Czeslaw Milosz, Nobel Prize lecture, 1980
Book quote from Trumpocracy by author David Frum
Sunset by Tu Fu
Sunset glitters on the beads
Of the curtains. Spring flowers
Bloom in the valley. The gardens
Along the river are filled
With perfume. Smoke of cooking
Fires drifts over the slow barges.
Sparrows hop and tumble in
The branches. Whirling insects
Swam in the air. Who discovered
That one cup of thick wine
Will dispel a thousand cares?
translated by Kenneth Rexroth
Leonard Durso 