PASS THE POETRY, PLEASE

"We would be together

and have our books and at night 

be warm in bed together with 

the windows open and the stars bright."

- Ernest Hemingway

I want us to go more the Hemingway (pun absolutely intended)

with our nights. Even if admittedly ours are very much together,

candlelight and even the open windows, there is a bit more cold light

from screens than starlight, and books between us in bed.

I wish us a more of that magic that lives between book pages.

I have always read a lot, come from a family of readers,

and want very much to pass the love of reading on to Cassius.

Probably needless to say the kid is not sitting reading on his own.

He is four years old and recognises his own name, mouths it from the letters

when he sees them. But he was, for some unreadable reason, 

deeply absorbed in Sierra DeMulder's We Slept Here that was laying

around on our bed. I wonder so what goes through his mind

when he departs like that. The details were in cahoots nonetheless,

an exemplary moment for a photograph.

How I read myself has changed lately.

I read more poetry than I used to. I also feverishly fold

more dogears than ever before and in almost everything I read,

and write down more sentences I want to remember in notes.

We are gratefully healthy, so the fever is over the words

and where they take me. Perhaps some of them

can inspire someone else other than me.

And so, this is my bedside table reading stack

at the moment, from top to bottom.

"Societies in which women have lots of autonomy and authority

tend to be decidedly male-friendly, relaxed, tolerant, and plenty sexy.

Got that, fellas? If you're unhappy at the amount of sexual opportunity

in your life, don't blame the women. Instead, make sure they have

equal access to power, wealth, and status. Then watch what happens."

- Cacilda Jethá (& Christopher Ryan),
Sex at Dawn

Jonathan Simons,

Songs of Waking (Poems)



"We would all like to believe we came from nowhere but ourselves,
every gesture is our own. But then we find we belong to the history and fate
of a long line of beings that also may have wished to be free."

- Patti Smith,
Devotion
(from the 'Why I Write' series)

I'm curious about author Simon Van Booy and started
with buying this one, that now already has quite a few dogears.


"I wonder if things can happen too early or too late or
if everything happens at exactly the right time.
If so, how sad and beautiful."


•


"I want to do things for people they will never forget.
Maybe that's the best thing I can do in life."


•


"It's true the people we meet shape us. But the people
we don't meet shape us also, often more because we have
imagined them so vividly.

There are people we yearn for but never seem to meet."




- Simon Van Booy,
The Secret Life of People in Love

'The Man who Planted Trees' is one of my favourite books

ever since my father gave me a copy many years ago.

I lost that one during one of my many moves,

and now felt I had to both own, and reread it.

"For a human character to reveal truly exceptional qualities,
one must have the good fortune to be able to observe
its performance over many years. If this performance is
devoid of all egoism, if its guiding motive is unparalleled generosity,
if it is absolutely certain that there is no thought of recompense and that,
in addition, it has left its visible mark upon the earth,
then there can be no mistake."

- Jean Giono,
The Man who Planted Trees

Several scattered sentences in my notes were by Ocean Vuong
I realised, so I wanted to try reading something of his.

"The most beautiful part of your body

is where it's headed.

& remember, / loneliness is still time spent /

with the world."

- Ocean Vuong,

'Night Sky With Exit Wounds'

I hope this finds you healthy and with more hope than despair.

And if you have a book or an author you want to suggest,

or anything that can inspire in these uncertain times for that matter,

- pass the poetry, please..!

hannah x

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BREATHING SPACE

Only one sentence I come across will do. Sticks. Holds, and holds me.

Make sure you stock up on

compassion. 

The rest of it; the silence, has to be translated only in photos from

a part of our home. Worn, white polka dot wallpaper that someone else

chose once (and, I realise seeing it like this, in pale and white, - a colour scheme

that is in interlude too), a winter that doesn't want to invite spring yet,

and a boy that doesn't understand the word virus as I try to

put it into words why everyone is staying at home so much, us too.

Make sure you stock up on
compassion.

∞
earthly matters | cassius's bed, bedding and canopy
are all from bonét et bonét, his hula-hoop was seasonally arranged
by the lovely emma of thistle by nature - flower delivery by bike in all
kinds of weather - for us, and the shell pillows are by
wonder woman tamar mogendorff

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THEN, WHAT DO YOU DREAM OF?

Inside of the condensed darkness when the others have fallen asleep is when I think the best.

That's when the words come to me in clarity and complete form. Torrential, thorough.

So, if this, for now, is my Room of One's Own I arrange, anew, the little table on my side

of the bed, as that morning's first tea cools. I stack books & notebooks and place a

candle close; a flame for the night, draw an unstudied loop from faint scrape to firm dark

that assures the pen is spirited. I leaf through the pages of the most beautiful of the notebooks,

the linen-covered hefty one that I believe to be empty but for 500 pages waiting.

Only then do I see it's got dark plum purple batik-like stains overflowing

its edges and on the flyleaf, it's written in graphite

Cassius Lemholt Violaris 
gave birth to this book on 11 / 05 / 19
by spilling red wine all over mamma's book.

The wine delicious.
The flavour of the mood bitter.

Papa
x


p.s 


the Candy Boxing Monkey Saga

Cassius - But you're a toy..!
Monkey a.k.a Papa - Yes. But I have a life.
Cassius - Oh. Okey. Then, what do you dream of..?

You know how you know the handwriting of a loved one.
(His letters have the softest edges but follow no rules of capital or lowercase.)
I hold the book, weigh it. I think of how different our together is now.
How we've also deepened into each other, us two. Somewhere among the days
since him, we've become accomplices in the unspoken,
- the sensuality in the gaps when he's asleep, to make love there;
the glances of fear when he's hurt himself, and we're yet to know how badly;
the poorly disguised pleasure of huddling in the bathtub that really is too small for three bodies;
 the significance of the hand stretched out to hold the other's under the covers
when he has entrenched himself in the middle and in between;
the smiling eyes that meet at the sidewalk when he yells
Thank You..! Byeeee..! to yet another bus driver;
the pure joy when he answers that his favourite day of the nursery week
is the one where they go visit the old people in the nursing home down the street;
how the other's voice drops and descends, to disappear like honey
into the night alongside Winnie the Pooh.

And you know how you know when you've found the core.
How you can almost touch an insight once it's finally landed in you.
How obvious it suddenly is.
It's here I have to start. It's because of this I have to start over.
This is where my new narrative comes into existence.
I'm going to fill the most beautiful notebook.






∞

monkey in its own kimono
she delivers flowers by bike in our city
chocolate-coloured cashmere

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ROOM FOR YOU

My life is nothing but room for you, I said.

-

The words from Kurt Vonnegut's novel Mother Night
has been following me around for weeks.
The book is not at all about motherhood, but the sentence
My life is nothing but room for you resonates deeply in me and
feels like it says it all, with only a few words, about being a mother.

He who turned out to be Cassius lived behind my ribcage and so far
remains the only one who's heard my heart beating from the inside.
I had insane morning sickness all hours of the day for three months
and that was followed by a virus. Pityriasis Rosea.
Also, roughly Mountain ridge Rose in my mother tongue.
Sounds like a serene coolheaded flower, but it put my skin on fire.
I held my fists clenched for months not to scratch and
counted down the weeks that was estimated left for the
venomously red roses to bloom on pale winter skin;
from delicate collarbone to hips slowly widening, in his name.

He came to us on a Sunday, in a room cloud high.
Rain hung there, it was all a swollen grey coulisses right
outside the large windows where candles burned still,
for what felt like infinity. Seagulls flew in circles and I floated.

Floated on my back in the warm, still water as if
it could go on infinitely through the waves of pain and illusiveness.
Floated with my left fist clenched around my fiance's hands and
my right around my sister's.
My own mother's words along my spine;

You have to be able to float, Hannah.
Swimming is good too..
but most of all you have to be able to float.
To float is to surrender. Float first. Then love.
That's what she said. One cannot exist without the other.

Now we share a room. A spacious one that opens on to backyards,
winding old fire-escapes and our wild little garden.
We have our large bed and his small one.
I turn the generous paper lamp on in the evenings.
It's got the wrong switch and needs an extra plug and this
makes its light flicker as if were it a giant lit candle.
Christian reads Winnie the Pooh with that voice I fell for
before we had even met and we all slumber together, close.
Only later do we lift Cassius over to his bed and pull the baldachin
around him, his little bed and around sleep itself (as if its own being).

I have no doubts where nothing hurts.
That's my most safe room as a mother. That I don't
think much about how things are 'supposed to be', or
how others do it, as long as it works for us.
As long as it stays afloat.
Lovemaking there's always room for.

My calm I think is his most safe room.
My melancholy, my worry, that I try to be honest about,
as long as he asks or listens. He's afraid of the dark.
We walk slowly through the long hallway after brushing our teeth.
I hold him and we don't turn any of the lights on.
His face is close to mine when I say that these are the
same rooms, just without the light.

My life is nothing but room for you.

The space he occupies can never be reclaimed.
Not when he's away either. My worry is in that, the sadness
of missing space, that there's not really time for it all.
That I can't quite find the way back to the rooms of my own.
Something tells me though, just as I put it into words,
that it's the word and thought of back to that has to go.

I can't go back. I can only try to create new room
inside of the life we have now. It will have to be in a home
a bit more worn, be in between wider hips,
eyes more tired and sentences only semifinished.
I had to listen to myself. It's the same rooms.
Just in a different light.

I think to myself that that's what it's like with the biggest,
enduring loves of our lives. They occupy all rooms and we are
never again the same as before. And then all is as it shall.






∞

i have a collaboration with danish brand bonét et bonét
{i do those types of collabs exclusively when i really like a brand
and solely with pieces i love and otherwise wouldäve bought}
cassius's rattan bed, bedding and canopy is from them
| the various shell pillows are by the amazing tamar mogendorff
| the brown pyjama is from soor ploom
| knits and all other clothing is by bonét et bonét

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