anna akhmatova (via@propertiesofjoy) \ mary oliver mindful(via@lilllium) \ leila chatti tea(via@propertiesofjoy) \ mary oliver blue horses: “i’m feeling fabulous, possibly too much so. but i love it” (via@liriostigre) \ sylvia plath the unabridged journals of sylvia plath (via@metamorphesque) \ warsan shire what we own
—in memory of the refugees drowned crossing the Mediterranean Sea
I should have known but the water never told me. It sealed its blue lips after swallowing you, it licked my ankles like a dog. I won’t lie and say the ocean begged for forgiveness; it gleams unchanged in the sun. Some things are so big they take and take and remain exactly the same size. Darkness is like this; grief too. I cry and the ocean slips from me—all along a little sea roiling inside with its own sad phantoms. For a summer I soaked in its green warmth, wore its salt like gemstones. Now the heavy shame: how I waded in to your grave as if trying it on, how, when the waves came, they gave me back.
