virgin-martyr

Text ID: The bare blue trees and bleached wooden sky of April / carve into me with knives of light.

Charles Wright, from "A Journal of the Year of the Ox", The World of Ten Thousand Things: Poems 1980-1990 [ID'd]

Sara Teasdale, “The Unseen”

Sara Teasdale, from “A Fantasy”

~ Edna St. Vincent Millay, from "Interim"

via southerncrossreview.org

To what purpose, April, do you return again? Beauty is not enough. You can no longer quiet me with the redness of little leaves opening stickily. I know what I know. The sun is hot on my neck as I observe the spikes of the crocus. The smell of the earth is good. It is apparent that there is no death. But what does that signify? Not only under ground are the brains of men eaten by maggots. Life in itself is nothing, an empty cup, a flight of uncarpeted stairs. It is not enough that yearly, down this hill, April comes like an idiot, babbling and strewing flowers.

— Anne Sexton, excerpt from “Cockroach”

Girls who are dreamy, girls who spend whole days lying down, girls who read whatever they come across, girls who are melancholy and bored.

A lovely soft spring day with pillow-like clouds, and warm blue spaces in between.

Fyodor Dostoevsky, tr. by Hugh Aplin, from "Poor People," originally written in 1846