#classiclit

Flectere si nequeo superos, Acheronta movebo.

If I can not bend the will of Heaven, I shall move Hell.

Non est ad astra mollis e terris via

There is no easy way from the earth to the stars

I think poetry is a way of carrying grief, but it’s also a way of putting it somewhere so I don’t always have to heave it onto my back or in my body. The more I put grief in a poem, the more l am able to move freely through the world because I have named it, spoken it, and thrown it out into the sky.

Everyone has grief that they carry and sometimes we have anxiety and depression about anticipatory grief.

The thing that I’ve found that helps is knowing we are all in this, someone has gone or is going through the same thing.

Poetry helps us with that too. Writing. Reading. As James Baldwin said, “You think your pain and heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, and then you read.”

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— Ada Limón interviewed by Lauren Leblanc

— Movie: Patterson (2016)

They deem me mad because I will not sell my days for gold; and I deem them mad because they think my days have a price.

Khalil Gibran, Sand and Foam

Sorrow is stronger than joy. One can forget joys, one never forgets sorrow. I am your suffering, that is why you can never stop loving me. Suffering alone is true, happiness isn’t.

Renée Vivien, A Woman Appeared to Me (tr. by Jeannette Howard Foster)

I am nothing. I’ll never be anything. I couldn’t want to be something. Apart from that, I have in me all the dreams in the world.

~ Fernando Pessoa