The Children Yearn For The Archives

ocean vuong | richard siken

Tuesday, 21st September 2021

I am a sucker for self-sabotage. My words, all of my own creation, fool me every time. Layers and layers of veiled truths that blind me--but I guess I am not looking at the signs.

Sue Zhao

i am haunted. i am my own haunting. i am the ghost in the graveyard of my body, mournful, monstrous.

—Ocean Vuong.

—May Sarton.

Wednesday, 28th July 2021

Love is more than the dream wistfully painted across torn pages in dripping ink and meadows of wildflowers, by writers and poets huddled by candlelight seeing love written in beloved faces. Seeing love in yearning clouds slowly chasing after the sun's fragile rays. Love is heartache and hurt and pain - a climbing river pushing back against everything you know. It inspires and challenges, it breathes life and ends it. It is everything we want and everything we do not dare to have. Love can bring just as much destruction to the harmony it creates. But it’s never about what love is or what it is not - it is how we shape its destiny within our own lives that counts. Love will always be with you, but will you let it stay? And sometimes we know that we just have to chase it away. 

“I desired always to stretch the night and fill it fuller and fuller with dreams.”

— Virginia Woolf, from ‘The Waves’

'The earliest Cinderella figures emerged within aristocratic milieus. Basile’s was prepared for academicians or their highly placed friends and acquaintances; Perrault’s was written for a princess of the blood; and d’Aulnoy’s was crafted for fellow salonières. In all three seventeenth-century tellings, Cinderella reproduced and represented aspects of aristocratic imaginaries.'

Ruth B. Bottigheimer, 'Cinderella: The People's Princess' in Cinderella across Cultures, ed. M. H. D. Rochere (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2016).

Blossom

A ghost is perched in the middle of the lane

softly swaying in a dull grey wind;

she has bloomed but now is still

full of ghostly feathers, like cotton

sheets fresh and waiting,

a new woven straw hat 

balanced on the crowded brass hook,

pillows of clouds and endless days

with no rain but the grass is dewy eyed 

and lost in a trailing book,

flyaways cutting a boundless sight,

some days are long and grey 

but then the nights --

           -- the blossom tree outside my window

tells me when spring is here

yet it is wasted in a silent darkness

softly perched in the middle of the lane,

feathers orange in the glow of a thousand sunsets

waiting to be seen again