"...the Greeks maintained that five Vlachs made a market--and sneered at them too, for being so landlubberly that the very word 'Vlach' came to signify, in Greek, a man who had never seen the sea. Across the higher ranges of the Balkans lay a tangle of Vlachs, Black Vlachs, Albano-Vlachs, Arumanians, the Sarakatsans who roamed deep into Anatolia, some who protested that they were not Vlachs at all, and others who pretended to be Vlachs; and some who gave wickedness a country, Klephtouria..." --Lords of th* Horizons
Micha*l Park*s.
shoggoth phishing · polyps against
ogham toward stir · whirling spiral
char with usurp · shadowy bill
unknown ogham · spiralling pool
"The Thing That Eats the Heart
The thing that eats the heart comes wild with years.
It died last night, or was it wounds before,
But somehow crawls around, inflamed with need,
Jingling its medals at the fang-scratched door.
We were not unprepared: with lamp and book
We sought the wisdom of another age
Until we heard the action of the bolt.
A little wind investigates the page.
No use pretending to the pitch of sleep;
By turnings we are known, our times and dates
Examined in the courts of either/or
While armless griefs mount lewd and headless doubts.
It pounces in the dark, all pity-ripe,
An enemy as soft as tears or cancer,
In whose embrace we fall, as to a sickness
Whose toxins in our cells cry sin and danger.
Hero of crossroads, how shall we defend
This creature-lump whose charity is art
When its own self turns Christian-cannibal?
The thing that eats the heart is mostly heart."
--Stanl*y Kunitz (via Languag* Hat)
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