She Does Not Know

I hold my brother on my lap,

I don't tell him to calm,

Or hush his sobs,

He does that himself.

I cannot stop his world ending,

But I am his sister, and as long as I stay,

He has a part of his world still there.

“I choose to love you in silence because in silence I find no rejection, and in silence no one owns you but me.”

— Rumi

2 April, 1937 Letters to Véra by Vladimir Nabokov

The roofs shackled deep,

Far below the spires of the churches

That not a soul wanders into

For fear of being seen and accosted.

The roofs shackled deep,

In the pockets of the pictures

That crop up on midnight lights

Every half year or so.

The roofs shackled deep,

And then held out of reach

Because blood is thicker than water

And both are bought to let.

Reap torn bodies with a bare hand

Because we'd all do it if we can,

There are those, and there's me

And then the crop of the land.

You don't have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them.

Ray Bradbury

Joy Sullivan, from “These Days People Are Really Selling Me On California”, Instructions for Traveling West

My mind holds the weight of

Long sleepless nights.

Each night I

Wait there to be taken,

By the space between the blinks,

Into colours i can only

Hope to think

I could imagine,

Where life is more, and

Where sleep is less

Than a reprieve.

"I swear there is no greater burden than to wait without hope."

— Beau Taplin from The Waiting

Fin

No more love No more poems No more hearts No more souls

No more sticks No more stones No more splints No more bones

No more bricks No more walls No more mines No more yours

No more tears No more loss No more fears No more gods

No more graves No more rows No more wars No more jokes

No more needs No more wants No more sex No more cunts

No more slack No more ropes No more deaths No more ghosts

No more breaths No more goals No more dreams No more hope

No more sleep No more thoughts No more thoughts No more thoughts

Embrace the dark Till the new day's begun There's always the dawn Always the sun

--- 30-4-2025, M.A. Tempels © Napowrimo 30: Always the sun