The rainbow’s end…

“If I had known I was that good, I wouldn’t have done the amount of giving up that I did”. | Labi Siffre

Pictures are all mine, manuscript images are from the blog. Quotes are cited.

To live in this world

you must be able

to do three things:

to love what is mortal;

to hold it

against your bones knowing

your own life depends on it;

and, when the time comes to let it go,

to let it go.

Mary Oliver | In Blackwater Woods

How should I not be glad to contemplate
the clouds clearing beyond the dormer window
and a high tide reflected on the ceiling?
There will be dying, there will be dying,
but there is no need to go into that.
The poems flow from the hand unbidden
and the hidden source is the watchful heart.
The sun rises in spite of everything
and the far cities are beautiful and bright.
I lie here in a riot of sunlight
watching the day break and the clouds flying.
Everything is going to be all right.

Derek Mahon | Everything is Going to be All Right

The night expands I am expanding
I watch your hands like butterflies landing
All among the myths and the legends we create
And all the laughing stories we tell our friends
Close the windows clear up the mess it’s getting late
It’s darker and closer to the end
And through the tunnel and down to the sea
And on the pebble beach your laces you untie
And arrange your shoes side by side
You wave and wave with wide lovely eyes
Distant waves and waves of distant love
You wave and say goodbye.

Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds | Wide Lovely Eyes

There was a man who used to live by the ocean
But he never set foot in the sea
It made him nervous that the water was always in motion
And he feared the creatures who swam beneath

And when I asked him how he’d ended up there
Above a world he would never know
He said he’d driven all the way across America
And when he got to thе edge, therе was nowhere left to go

Nowhere left to go.

Death Cab For Cutie | Foxglove Through the Clearcut

Whan that Aprille with his shoures soote,
The droghte of March hath perced to the roote,
And bathed every veyne in swich licóur
Of which vertú engendred is the flour;
Whan Zephirus eek with his swete breeth
Inspired hath in every holt and heeth
The tendre croppes, and the yonge sonne
Hath in the Ram his halfe cours y-ronne,
And smale foweles maken melodye,
That slepen al the nyght with open ye,
So priketh hem Natúre in hir corages,
Thanne longen folk to goon on pilgrimages…

Geffrey Chaucer | General Prolgue, The Canterbury Tales

Do I wanna know? If this feelin’ flows both ways?

Sad to see you go was sorta hopin’ that you’d stay

Baby we both know that the nights were mainly made

for saying things that you can’t say tomorrow day.

Arctic Monkeys | Do I Wanna Know

If you can fall in love again and again, if you can forgive your parents for the crime of bringing you into the world, if you are content to get nowhere, just take each day as it comes, if you can forgive as well as forget, if you can keep from growing sour, surly, bitter and cynical; man, you’ve got it half licked.

Henry Miller | Sextet: Six essays

Again and again, even though we know love’s landscape

and the little churchyard with its lamenting names

and the terrible reticent gorge in which the others

end: again and again the two of us walk out together

under the ancient trees, lay ourselves down again and again

among the flowers, and look up into the sky.

[Again and again, even though we know love’s landscape ] | Rainer Maria Rilke