Suffering does not destroy the possibility of suffering, and
living does not do away with the art of self-hallucination. In
the space of a life, the shellfish that pass through the cracks
in the coral are a hidden, infinitesimal music which a huge
band is now playing, and the people march from the cracks
towards a magnificent future. Yes, it is true, light will scatter
from the lowliest of places, and all the ugliest of smells
are omens for war, but I sit on the rubbish pile singing,
singing a song about the marriage of plastic and fire, a song
which will sing the recluse underground up to the surface.
When he comes to the surface the flowerless fruit will bloom,
the shells will offer a crooked way out, and everything
once again will descend, repeating until infinity. Just like this,
he says, suffering does not destroy the possibility of suffering.
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Photograph of pink rose petals floatig on water
 "In the Rose Garden"

"Narratives describing strange, sometimes dreamlike, episodes from a female protagonist’s childhood dominate the second section of Helen Tookey’s four-part collection of poems and prose poems, City of Departures. Some of the subjects are literary heroines or versions of them: here, the pronoun 'she' leaves identification open. Her experience is both individual and representative."

via THE GUARDIAN
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Cover of the Penguin Classics edition of Sir Thomas Wyatt's The Complete Poems
What Sparks Poetry:
James Longenbach on Sir Thomas Wyatt’s “They Flee From Me”


"I’ve never much cared if a poem is metered or not, rhymed or not, and I found the twentieth century’s transformation of these formal tools into weapons by and large distracting. All poems live or die in the concerted arrangement of syllables into patterns that are alternatively broken or reinforced. Wyatt taught me that." 
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