Ilse

“Night, street and streetlight, drugstore,
The purposeless, half-dim, drab light.
For all the use live on a quarter century –
Nothing will change. There’s no way out.
–
You’ll die – and start all over, live twice,
Everything repeats itself, just as it was:
Night, the canal’s rippled icy surface,
The drugstore, the street, and streetlight.”
― Alexander Blok

“Is this love reality
Or a dream?
I cannot know,
When both reality and dreams
Exist without truly existing.”
― Ono no Komachi, The Ink Dark Moon: Love Poems by Ono no Komachi and Izumi Shikibu, Women of the Ancient Court of Japan

“The day breaks not: it is my heart.”
― John Donne, The Complete English Poems

“At least let me now deceive myself with illusions
so as not to feel my empty life.

And yet I came so close so many times.
And yet how paralyzed I was, how cowardly;
why did I keep my lips sealed
while my empty life wept inside me,
my desires wore robes of mourning?

To have been so close so many times
to those sensual eyes, those lips,
to that body I dreamed of, loved.
To have been so close so many times.

September 1903”
― Constantinos P. Cavafis