Welcome to Day 19 of 31 Days of Kissing the Wounds, a month of posts about the beauty, longing, and soul inherent in our damaged selves; in the world’s brokenness; in the imperfection, incompleteness, and transience of all that we love; in our recognition of each other as the walking wounded; and in the jagged, messy, splintery, deformed, sullied, unhealed parts of me, you, the natural world, our communities, the culture. Each post will look at these ideas from its own vantage point, which may not obviously connect with the others.

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“We don’t forget, but something vacant settles in us.”

— Roland Barthes, Mourning Diary (2012)

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“I saw old Autumn in the misty morn
Stand shadowless like silence, listening
To silence.”

— Thomas Hood, from “Ode: Autumn” (1827)

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“I want to explain to her that loneliness isn’t remedied by people around me, that my loneliness is an integral part of me.”

— Sejal Badani, Trail of Broken Wings (2015)

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This year,
fall muffles the garden
and nearby haunts.

It’s a kind of vacancy,
what’s left after the colour fades,
after the structure softens,
after the green gives way.

It’s silence, listening to silence.

It’s a kind of loneliness:
mourn the voices of beetles and bees, miss the dragonflies now dampened,
feel forsaken by zinnias, formerly cheerful, so happy to see you,
now lost in a brown study, looking away, suddenly absent, dulled.

Some days, mostly mornings and evenings,
it’s a misty, foggy obscuring of detail,
an unfocused distraction of yellow, red, orange.

Behind the blur,
familiar suggestions of plants you knew
begin to dissociate from this sharp world.

A dreamscape of contrast,
everywhere you look:
shouted last hurrahs,
quiet last rites.

the season smudges distance:
memory,
and what’s approaching,
as you stand dazed
and muted.

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“I dream of places I have never been, but I dream of them often so they are familiar–”

— Joana Doxey, from “The Book of Worry”

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Can’t get enough of the lovely dead and dying? Instagram: Lovely Dead Crap. Very lovely.

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Thanks for checking in. Be sure to see what the other 31 Dayers are writing about.