magic in a garden somewhere




Long Exposure Photographs of Fireflies in the Forests of Nagoya City by Yume CyanJune 4, 2013








"For the last month or so photographer Yume Cyan has been shooting some magical long exposure photographs of fireflies in a forested area around Nagoya City, Japan. By keeping the camera’s shutter open at a low aperture Cyan captures every bioluminescent flash of each insect resulting in dotted light trails that criss-cross the frame. You may remember a similar series of photographs also shot in Japan from back in 2011. You can see these a bit larger over on500px."

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“A kiss on the forehead”
BY MARINA TSVETAEVA


A kiss on the forehead—erases misery.
I kiss your forehead.

A kiss on the eyes—lifts sleeplessness.
I kiss your eyes.

A kiss on the lips—is a drink of water.
I kiss your lips.

A kiss on the forehead—erases memory.


1917


KISSING HAMLET



"A sparrow falls by providence, and the evening sky
is smeared indigo. I won’t repeat our darling word
dusk, since breaking old habits is a new promise.
Sometimes the heart locks, before it dangles, ready
for releasing. Something in the amorphous shape
the trees espouse at this time of day is a resistance
to anything particular or complex, as if a more subtle
variation were possible. A toning down of contrast
makes the hour we named for us a kind of yielding.
‘We are something’, you say, and I try to believe.
But even as I write, the sky’s streaks fade, the burls
of cloud formations begin to disappear, obeying
Newton’s third law that for every act in this universe
there is an equal and opposite one. Today I walked
the streets, observing what I’ve missed of late—
a white magnolia in full bloom with delicately scented
petals, chaste as Ophelia, among the topiary plants;
a house in ruins becoming some ugly new development.
And, of course, I thought of us—that hole we cut
in the stillness of evening, when the heart is disposed
to abandon the thought of never wanting this to stop.
The heart is mute but cries out in protest: Be free,
what are you afraid of? Advice I tested last night
at the Opera Bar. I kissed the princely lips of madness:
Hamlet himself, after the proscenium. Not yet drunk.
His eyes, untamed, a little lost, perhaps. I trembled
but he didn’t seem to mind, and I was glad, recalling
a soliloquy which speaks of fate’s occasion being fickle,
how the end is ever present, how the readiness is all.
The harbour slapped softly, in Luna Park the Ferris wheel
turned. At least every so often, it is good to tremble.
And somehow the moment cured me of the incomplete
metaphor of madness I had taken for myself.  So moments
change us, the evening bleeds and bruises. Words come
to me as freely as a sparrow falls, unfastened by the sky."
© 2010, Michelle Cahill
From: Etchings, Issue 8, May, 2010
All Photography by Willy Ronis.

Pablo's Muse

The Heart of a Woman
BY GEORGIA DOUGLAS JOHNSON
The heart of a woman goes forth with the dawn,
As a lone bird, soft winging, so restlessly on,
Afar o’er life’s turrets and vales does it roam
In the wake of those echoes the heart calls home.

The heart of a woman falls back with the night,
And enters some alien cage in its plight,
And tries to forget it has dreamed of the stars
While it breaks, breaks, breaks on the sheltering bars.



Photography by Dora Maar. Painting by Pablo Picasso.








One more burst of color...

to relieve the restlessness of one's heart.

Sarah Moon


All the Difficult Hours and Minutes
BY JANE HIRSHFIELD

All the difficult hours and minutes
are like salted plums in a jar.
Wrinkled, turn steeply into themselves,
they mutter something the color of  sharkfins to the glass.
Just so, calamity turns toward calmness.
First the jar holds the umeboshi, then the rice does.