Tegan (Slant Postscripts)

“Witch. The word slithers from the mouth like a serpent, drips from the tongue as thick and black as tar. We never thought of ourselves as witches, my mother and I. For this was a word invented by men, a word that brings power to those that speak it, not those that it describes. A word that builds gallows and pyres, turns breathing women into corpses.”
― Emilia Hart, Weyward

“But to look back from the stony plain along the road which led one to that place is not at all the same thing as walking on the road; the perspective to say the very least, changes only with the journey; only when the road has, all abruptly and treacherously, and with an absoluteness that permits no argument, turned or dropped or risen is one able to see all that one could not have seen from any other place.”
― James Baldwin, Go Tell It on the Mountain

“I hate myself. I hate this world;
And I long now only to quit it,
But tell me, oh God, where my place is,
In the new world, or don’t I fit in it?”
― Lilian Morgan, Poetical Works

“What Am I to Write?

What am I to write for you?
Blank page,
White emptiness,
Broken words are not enough
Nor spluttered ink spat out in ignorance,
Contemptuous of its desire to mark
And maim,
Indulges so at first,
And then again.
But No
I will not take to mediocre ways,
Nor overplay the passion song in muse,
For the heart well tuned
Needs not the head
To pump its life,
And the arteries awakened to the rhythm,
Subtle rhythm,
Should suffice.”
― Iona Matheson, In Retrospect