Divided

lifeinpoetry:

“To be rooted is perhaps the most important and least recognized need of the human soul.”

— Simone Weil, from The Need for Roots

thevelvetpelican:

Remember how in elementary school when you finished your work you got to read whatever book you brought along that day?

Those were the days, dude.

lifeinpoetry:

Even in my dreams
I do not follow you 

I belong more to my own survival
than to you
and the fiction of permanence.

— Clementine von Radics, “Listen closely,” In a Dream You Saw a Way to Survive

lovingsylvia:

“It was the day after Christmas and a gray sky bellied over us, fat with snow. I felt overstuffed and dull and disappointed, the way I always do the day after Christmas, as if whatever it was the pine boughs and the candles and the silver and gilt-ribboned presents and the birch-log fires and the Christmas turkey and the carols and the piano promised never came to pass.”

— Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar, Chapter 8

buttonpoetry:

“A white yogi tells me I can breathe through the apocalypse in my bloodstream and I do 6,000 downward dogs and never stop feeling the choke of the leash.”

— Andrea Gibson, from Lord of the Butterflies

jawshington:

when your mental illness starts acting up again

lifeinpoetry:

Mother, I know grief is an ocean too vast
to swallow, pulling at our womanhood with
sharpened teeth, blood all in the water,

beckoning hurt. Guilt the way we cut at
ourselves, bodies against rock, beached
until burning.

— Kanika Lawton, from “Grief, Carrying,” published in Rust + Moth