Albert Renger-Patzsch, Winter Landscape, 1925
A Winter Night
The storm puts its mouth to the house
and blows to get a tone.
I toss and turn, my closed eyes
reading the storm’s text.
The child’s eyes grow wide in the dark
and the storm howls for him.
Both love the swinging lamps;
both are halfway towards speech.
The storm has the hands and wings of a child.
Far away, travellers run for cover.
The house feels its own constellation of nails
holding the walls together.
The night is calm in our rooms,
where the echoes of all footsteps rest
like sunken leaves in a pond,
but the night outside is wild.
A darker storm stands over the world.
It puts its mouth to our soul
and blows to get a tone. We are afraid
the storm will blow us empty.
—Tomas Tranströmer
Translated from the Swedish by Robin Robertson. From The Deleted World, Straus and Giroux. Text in the original Swedish here. With thanks to Poetry Daily.
![Takashi Shimura as Watanabe, the bureaucrat doomed to die from cancer, in Ikiru (1952, dir. Akira Kurosawa)
“Occasionally I think of my death … then I think, how could I ever bear to take a final breath; while living a life like this, how could I leave it? There is, I feel, so much more for me to do — I keep feeling I have lived so little yet. Then I become thoughtful, but not sad. It was from such a feeling that Ikiru arose.”
One of my favorite films. Thank you, liquidnight.
-Kurosawa, quoted in Akira Kurosawa: Interviews
[via oldhollywood]](http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_ltr332NSCS1qzdvhio1_r2_1280.jpg)
Takashi Shimura as Watanabe, the bureaucrat doomed to die from cancer, in Ikiru (1952, dir. Akira Kurosawa)
“Occasionally I think of my death … then I think, how could I ever bear to take a final breath; while living a life like this, how could I leave it? There is, I feel, so much more for me to do — I keep feeling I have lived so little yet. Then I become thoughtful, but not sad. It was from such a feeling that Ikiru arose.”
One of my favorite films. Thank you, liquidnight.
-Kurosawa, quoted in Akira Kurosawa: Interviews
[via oldhollywood]
Isaac Levitan: The Forest in Winter (1880). With thanks to Memory Green.
F. Antipov, Winter, 1929. Thank you, firsttimeuser.
Koyo Okada, Winter Landscape, 1950, Gelatin silver print. Thank you, theshipthatflew.
Vilhelm Hammershøi -Winter Landscape, 1895-6 (via: amare-habeo & aperfectcommotion)
(Source: mythologyofblue)
Walter Hege, Seeufer im Winter, 1930. Thank you, arsvitaest.
The Storm
Now through the white orchard my little dog
romps, breaking the new snow
with wild feet.
Running here running there, excited,
hardly able to stop, he leaps, he spins
until the white snow is written upon
in large, exuberant letters,
a long sentence, expressing
the pleasures of the body in this world.
Oh, I could not have said it better
- Mary Oliver
From Whiskey River
Winter solitude—
in a world of one color
the sound of wind.
Basho (From yama-bato)
