Quotes Tagged "poetry"

. . .because we had survived sisters and brothers, daughters and sons, we discovered bones that rose from the dark earth and sang as white birds in the trees Because the story of our life becomes our life Because each of us tells the same story but tells it differently and none of us tells it the same way twice . . (from, Why We Tell Stories)

we want it visible to show when even the most visible joy will reveal itself only when we have transformed it within. there’s nowhere, my love, the world can exist expect within.

She was remembering His gaze, those deep pools of blue, crystalline in nature, peering deep into her soul. She remembered the first night she had looked into that darkness – no, into that light in his eyes – they were level and straight, kind and compassionate, without any ado, Her hands in His, offerings of comfort and concern for Her station, the concern she felt for those close to Her, each to their own heaven or hell, and the law of attraction began to build.

In an old family album Ever again you return, Melancholy, O meekness of the solitary soul. A golden day glows and expires. Humbly the patient man surrenders to pain Ringing with melodious sound and soft madness. Look! There's the twilight. Night returns once more and a mortal thing laments And another suffers in sympathy. Shuddering under autumn stars Yearly the head is bowed deeper. -Georg Trakl (1887-1914)

In this universe there are no time machines or keys that can turn hearts back around.

Once upon a time I fell in love Lost myself And find another one.

I began a poem in lines of one syllable. It's rather difficult, but the merit of all things lies in their difficulty. The subject matter is gallant. I'll read you the first canto; it's four hundred verses long and takes one minute.

Is there life before death? That’s chalked up In Ballymurphy. Competence with pain, Coherent miseries, a bite and a sup, We hug our little destiny again.

I feel the only thing you can do about life is to preserve it, by art if you're an artist, by children if you're not.

I will turn human anatomy into roses and stars and sea. I will dissect the beloveds body in metaphor.

How can the bird that is born for joy Sit in a cage and sing? How can a child, when fears annoy, But droop his tender wing, And forget his youthful spring?

where some god pissed a rain of reason to make things grow only to die,

Be ahead of all parting, as though it already were behind you, like the winter that has just gone by. For among these winters there is one so endlessly winter that only by wintering through it will your heart survive.

Poetry is as necessary to comprehension as science. It is as impossible to live without reverence as it is without joy.

I went down not long ago to the Mad River, under the willows I knelt and drank from that crumpled flow, call it what madness you will, there's a sickness worse than the risk of death and that's forgetting what we should never forget. Tecumseh lived here. The wounds of the past are ignored, but hang on like the litter that snags among the yellow branches, newspapers and plastic bags, after the rains. Where are the Shawnee now? Do you know? Or would you have to write to Washington, and even then, whatever they said, would you believe it? Sometimes I would like to paint my body red and go into the glittering snow to die. His name meant Shooting Star. From Mad River country north to the border he gathered the tribes and armed them one more time. He vowed to keep Ohio and it took him over twenty years to fail. After the bloody and final fighting, at Thames, it was over, except his body could not be found, and you can do whatever you want with that, say his people came in the black leaves of the night and hauled him to a secret grave, or that he turned into a little boy again, and leaped into a birch canoe and went rowing home down the rivers. Anyway this much I'm sure of: if we meet him, we'll know it, he will still be so angry.

This is where I belong, burning in these flames. For everything I have done wrong, I know I am to blame.

Music, when combined with a pleasurable idea, is poetry; music, without the idea, is simply music; the idea, without the music, is prose, from its very definitiveness.

The first year was like icing. Then the cake started to show through …

There's a book of poetry in the lines of my hands that no one wants to read

These poems, with all their crudities, doubts and confusions, are written for the love of man and in Praise of God, and I'd be a damn fool if they weren't.