straightforwardly

► Last night, I finished reading volume two of the official translation for Thousand Autumns, the end of which is fairly close to where I believe I left off with the fan translation. It actually surprises me that I was only this far into the novel—I’d assumed ( spoilers beneath the cut )

► More High Rollers Aerois thoughts! Currently, I just finished episode 91. ( beneath the cut )

► Finally, I have a poem to share— “The Star-Bright Hour” by Betty Alver.

I came across it because I was actually titling a fic after an excerpt from a different poet of hers, and wanted to reread the line in its original context, but was too lazy to dig out the book I originally found it in. So I tried to to see if I could find it online, but did not meaning that I had to go to my shelves anyway. However, in the process I found another poem by her which I liked and now want to share here.

( full text beneath the cut )

► I do also have some writing thoughts I want to take the time to reflect on (mostly in regard to iddyiddybangbang, which I successfully completed for the first time this year!), but that's for another post, I think.

Reading: The Lady’s Guide to Celestial Mechanics by Olivia Waite—about 83% through, according to my ereader. I’m not fully sold on the romance, but it has enough other things going for it that I’m enjoying it nonetheless.
Listening: Just caught up on Fic Clique; now I’m vaguely bouncing around from podcast to podcast, trying to figure out which to catch up on/start next.
Playing: The Amber Throne! An indie(?) rpg with a really lovely art direction—I’ve owned it on Steam via HumbleBundle since 2016, I think.
Watching: Nothing, unless historical sewing videos on youtube count. (They probably should, come to think of it.)
Writing: Currently focusing on an OW piece inspired by one of my own Relationshipping requests from this past year.

► On the last day of the year, while at work, I was thinking about Zbigniew Herbert’s “The Elegy of Fortinbras”—which some of you might remember is a poem that I have a lot of feelings about. I did a reread of Hamlet sometime in mid-December, which made this poem stick in the forefront of my mind even more than usual.

Anyways, as I was thinking about it, I was suddenly struck by the line, I could never think of your hands without smiling. For the first time, it occurred to me: that’s kind of an intimate thing to be thinking about?

( beneath the cut )

► On the first day of this year, I read a short story by T. Kingfisher that I hadn’t been aware of before — “Metal Like Blood in the Dark”. Unsurprisingly, I loved it!

I wanted to copy down some of my favorite lines beneath the cut, but… spoilers, so I do recommend reading the short story first before clicking on it, assuming that you click on it at all—you really don’t need to, as this is very much something I’m copying down just for my own sake, not for anyone else’s enjoyment, and I don’t know if anyone else would get anything out of it.

( beneath the cut )

I might be posting this too early, as Day 2 of the Snowflake Challenge should be coming up and it could be a prompt that I’d want to fill—but oh well. If that ends up being the case, making a second entry in the same day won’t hurt anyone.

Today I came across a poem that really struck me (via Contemporary East European Poetry: An Anthology).
( poem under the cut )

Because I've been kind of neglecting this journal, and it's been a while since I've made one of these posts.

It's in the same format as always— the title and author, an excerpt from the poem, and a link to where you can read the whole thing.

( everything I've had is gone )

Another post where I dump some links to poems I've run across, enjoyed, and bookmarked. Fair warning: Most of the poems near the end of this post are about grief.
( so remembering him )

I've started to clean out my bookmarks (which, despite the incredible amount of folders and subfolders and sub-subfolders I have, still manages to be incredibly disorganized), and there's so many different things I don't want to just delete the links to, but I know I'll never see again if I just sort them into their own, special folder.

Hence, my deciding to dump the links in my DW. I'll be likely to see it again, it could potentially be interesting for other people (depending on what the links are to), and I just like the idea.

Anyways. As the title of this post indicates, this is my poetry edition. Because I love poetry, and I've just been reading more and more of it as time goes on. So it's a little more interesting, I'll quote some lines from each one I liked.

( putting under a cut because it's semi-long )

There's more, but I think I may have overdone it as it is, so. Hopefully someone other than me enjoys this. ♥