Quotes by "Jane Hirshfield"

Poetry's work is the clarification and magnification of being.

as some strings, untouched, sound when no one is speaking. So it was when love slipped inside us.

One breath taken completely; one poem, fully written, fully read - in such a moment, anything can happen.

One way poetry connects is across time. . . . Some echo of a writer's physical experience comes into us when we read her poem.

Each Moment a White Bull Steps Shining into the World If the gods bring to you a strange and frightening creature, accept the gift as if it were one you had chosen. Say the accustomed prayers, oil the hooves well, caress the small ears with praise. Have the new halter of woven silver embedded with jewels. Spare no expense, pay what is asked, when a gift arrives from the sea. Treat it as you yourself would be treated, brought speechless and naked into the court of a king. And when the request finally comes, do not hesitate even an instant---- stroke the white throat, the heavy trembling dewlaps you'd come to believe were yours, and plunge in the knife. Not once did you enter the pasture without pause, without yourself trembling, that you came to love it, that was the gift. Let the envious gods take back what they can.

The heart's actions are neither the sentence nor its reprieve. Salt hay and thistles, above the cold granite. One bird singing back to another because it can't not.

What is usual is not what is always. As sometimes, in old age, hearing comes back. Footsteps resume their clipped edges, birds quiet for decades migrate back to the ear. Where were they? By what route did they return? A woman mute for years forms one perfect sentence before she dies.

One reason to write a poem is to flush from the deep thickets of the self some thought, feeling, comprehension, question, music, you didn't know was in you, or in the world.

In the dream life, you don't deliberately set out to dream about a house night after night; the dream itself insists you look at whatever is trying to come into visibility.

You can't write an image, a metaphor, a story, a phrase, without leaning a little further into the shared world, without recognizing that your supposed solitude is at every point of its perimeter touching some other.