windows, sunsets
In recent years, I've had to move around so much that the only time I truly felt at home was when I watched the familiar, yet always surprising, hues of the sunset lighting up the sky from an airplane window. I've felt joy, anger, heartbreak, despair, but found whatever it was that I was feeling reflected in the sky. In the past year, I've felt all of this and more, but had to do with the slightly less romantic version- staring at the sunset from my own window. It doesn't quite work the same way. Guess when you're suspended 35,000 ft. above in the air, looking at the world as they creep around their lives, your problems do seem minuscule. I've put all my emotions together though, kept them aside, only to look back on when I can stare at the sunset from an airplane again.
— Snigdha
— Jim Darling
where is the name no one answered to
gone off to live by itself
beneath the pine trees separating the houses
without a friend or a bed
without a father to tell it stories
how hard was the path it walked on
all those years belonging to none
of our struggles drifting under
the calendar page elusive as
residue when someone said
how have you been it was
strangely that name that tried
to answer
— Naomi Shihab Nye, Dusk
— Malwa Grabowska
I think I believe this.
Sunset the word holds more than a photo could.
Since it announces the sun then puts it away.
I watched your face, just out of reach.
The flowers are diminished by the lens.
The woman tries and tries to make it right
bending her knees, tilting back.
I take a photo of a sunset, with flash.
I who think I have something
to learn from anything learned nothing from the streetlight
that shines obnoxiously into my bedroom.
This is my photo of a tree in bloom.
A thought unfolding
across somebody’s face.
— Ari Banias, A Sunset
Doing the dishes after she died, he was
struck by the weight of the butter knives.
Their cold handles pressed into his palm
as he lifted them from the drying rack
and carried them to the silverware drawer,
where he placed them in their narrow bed.
But it was the spoons.
It was the spoons that made him weep.
— Robert Grant, Silverware (after Donald Hall)
— Rene Wiley, High Clouds Over The Emerald
I will die, just as you will–you and I
unknown to ourselves and to each other,
when ears can’t hear or tongue make sounds.
Even a young poet who longs to lay a girl
as I did you will in time lack everything.
All shapes will disappear from my mind,
even the ghost of you lingering there,
your voice coming down the stairwell,
“Is that you, Richard?” “It’s me.”
Memories, versions, voices come to an end,
the stairs, rooms, buildings all gone too,
you on the third floor buzzing me in.
— Richard J. Fein, To a Woman Remembered
“the years go by, we find our doors and windows. Some are always open, some never were.”
― Naomi Shihab Nye, Transfer
But leave me a little love,
A voice to speak to me in the day end,
A hand to touch me in the dark room
Breaking the long loneliness.
In the dusk of day-shapes
Blurring the sunset,
One little wandering, western star
Thrust out from the changing shores of shadow.
Let me go to the window,
Watch there the day-shapes of dusk
And wait and know the coming
Of a little love.
— Carl Sandburg, At A Window
Did you expect this violet black
soft edge to outer space, fragile as blown ash
and shuddering like oil, or the reddish
orange that flows into
your lungs and through your fingers?
The waves smooth mouthpink light
over your eyes, fold after fold.
This is the sun you breathe in,
pale blue. Did you
expect it to be this warm?
— Margaret Atwood, Sunset II
“One day,' you said, 'I watched the sunset forty-three times!'
And a little later you added:
'You know, when one is that sad, one can get to love the sunset.'
'Were you that sad, then, on the day of the forty-three sunset?'
But the prince made no answer.”
― Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince
“The sky takes on shades of orange during sunrise and sunset, the colour that gives you hope that the sun will set only to rise again.”
— Ram Charan
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This newsletter was curated by Snigdha Bansal. You can find her on her Instagram.
As always, you can find more art & poetry on our website ~ unographymag.com
