Peeling Onions – Adrienne Rich

Only to have a grief

equal to all these tears!

 

There’s not a sob in my chest.

Dry-hearted as Peer Gynt

 

I pare away, no hero,

merely a cook.

 

Crying was labor, once

when I’d good cause.

Walking, I felt my eyes like wounds

raw in my head,

so postal-clerks, I thought, must stare.

A dog’s look, a cat’s, burnt to my brain–

yet all that stayed

stuff in my lungs like smog.

 

These old tears in the chopping-bowl.

 

Adrienne Rich.

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One Hundred Love Sonnets: XVIII – Pablo Naruda

I don’t love you as if you were a rose of salt, topaz,
or arrow of carnations that propagate fire:
I love you as one loves certain obscure things,
secretly, between the shadow and the soul.

I love you as the plant that doesn’t bloom but carries
the light of those flowers, hidden, within itself,
and thanks to your love the tight aroma that arose
from the earth lives dimly in my body.

I love you directly without problems or pride:
I love you like this because I don’t know any other way to love,
except in this form in which I am not nor are you,
so close that your hand upon my chest is mine,
so close that your eyes close with my dreams.

 

Pablo Neruda.

 

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