Oscar Wilde

The Sphinx In a dim corner of my room for longer than my fancy thinks A beautiful and silent Sphinx has watched me through the shifting gloom. Inviolate and immobile she does not rise she does not stir For silver moons are naught to her and naught to her the suns that reel. Red follows […]

Gustave Flaubert

This sense of my own weakness and emptiness comforts me. I feel myself a mere speck of dust lost in space, yet I am part of that endless grandeur which envelopes me. I could never see why that should be cause for despair, since there could very well be nothing at all behind the black […]

Theodore Roethke

I have known the inexorable sadness of pencils, Neat in their boxes, dolor of pad and paper weight, All the misery of manilla folders and mucilage, Desolation in immaculate public places, Lonely reception room, lavatory, switchboard, The unalterable pathos of basin and pitcher, Ritual of multigraph, paper-clip, comma, Endless duplicaton of lives and objects. And […]

C. S. Lewis

No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear. ― C. S. Lewis, A Grief Observed. (HarperOne; 1 edition, February 6, 2001) Originally published 1961.

Beth Bachmann

No shepherds. No nymphs. Maybe just one: the girl the fawn strips like a fisherman’s rose. Death turns its mouth red. It can no longer lie in the lilies. Not on my watch. The lake is filthy with silver fish sticky with leeches. Lovesick, I flick a feather into the water. No stones. Only the […]