The diabolical thing about melancholy is not that it makes you ill but that it makes you conceited and shortsighted; yes, almost arrogant.
You lapse into bad taste, thinking of yourself as Heine's Atlas, whose shoulders support all the world's puzzles and agonies, as if thousands, lost in the same maze, did not endure the same agonies. In my state of isolation and estrangement I too failed to realize that the traits and peculiarities of character I took to be exclusively mine were in fact part of my family's heritage, my family's affliction.
Hermann Hesse
I am dazed by the beauty of my body
I am dazed by the beauty of my body.
today I looked at myself with your eyes. discovered
the soft curve of shoulders the tired round breasts which
want to sleep and slowly roll down in spite of themselves.
my legs unfolding offering infinitely up to
the limits absent from what is me and what beyond me
throbs in every leaf in every raindrop.
I saw myself as if through glass in your eyes
looking at me. I felt your hands on the warm tight
skin of my thighs and obeying your command
I stood naked before a huge mirror and then
I covered your eyes not to see and not to feel
the loneliness of my body blossoming with you.
Halina Poswiatowsk
