Poetry Quotes - Page 68

Unforgiveness,splinter in your breastbone, lives there lodged like a small tree.Withers in winter, looms in spring. Its fruit is sweet on first bite, then turns into the taste of your own flesh.

When love beckons to you, follow him,Though his ways are hard and steep.And When his wings enfold you yield to him,Though the sword hidden among his pinions may wound you.And When he speaks to you believe in him,Though his voice may shatter your dreams as the north wind lays waste the garden...But if in your fear you would seek only love’s peace and love’s pleasure,Then it is better for you that you cover your nakedness and pass out oflove’s threshing-floor,Into the seasonless world where you shall laugh, but not all of your laughter, and weep, but not all of your tears...But if you love and must needs have desires, let these be your desires:To melt and be like a running brook that sings its melody to the night.To know the pain of too much tenderness.To be wounded by your own understanding of love;And to bleed willingly and joyfully.

Poetry must be as new as foam and as old as the rock.

Heavy as such things areAfter the wordslide, the writing begins."From "Word Quake

The ribboned gallons that rule us like beliefs rooted in single experiences.

Writing and art are my lovers

Stars are only the rain of the Absolute.

We are all too fixed on wrecking ourselves rather than bettering ourselves.

I dreamed I spoke in another's language,I dreamed I lived in another's skin,I dreamed I was my own beloved,I dreamed I was a tiger's kin.I dreamed that Eden lived inside me,And when I breathed a garden came,I dreamed I knew all of Creation,I dreamed I knew the Creator's name.I dreamed--and this dream was the finest--That all I dreamed was real and true,And we would live in joy forever,You in me, and me in you.

Sometimes, the only things in this world that make sense are the moon, my madness and your hands messing up my hair, while your teeth sink into my soul.

The fear of loving a dog, is knowing one day they’ll be gone and you could never find eyes that express all that you feel.

I can speak of you now to anyone because I’ve stopped wanting anything like what I once wanted from you.

A poem is a ‘line’ between any two points in creation.

Ring out, wild bells, to the wild sky,The flying cloud, the frosty light;The year is dying in the night;Ring out, wild bells, and let him die.Ring out the old, ring in the new,Ring, happy bells, across the snow:The year is going, let him go;Ring out the false, ring in the true.

What if you slept And what if In your sleep You dreamed And what if In your dream You went to heaven And there plucked a strange and beautiful flower And what if When you awoke You had that flower in you hand Ah, what then?

I will soothe you and heal you,I will bring you roses.I too have been covered with thorns.

She dances in a ring of fire and throws of the challenge with a shrug.

...I would not engage the wombatIn any form of mortal combat.

I would define, in brief, the poetry of words as the rhythmical creation of beauty.

I will liken my judgment unto a ring: like as there is no slackness of the last, even so there is no swiftness of the first.

Limit not to only five, when the divine gifts the supreme sixth; the sense of dance

Even when muddy your wings sparkle bright wonders that heal broken worlds.

Anger's like a battery that leaks acid right out of meAnd it starts from the heart 'til it reaches my outer me

No honest poet can ever feel quite sure of the permanent value of what he has written: he may have wasted his time and messed up his life for nothing.

nothing is lifelesswhen the moon writes its screedon the silvern sand silence-From the poem:"The Universe In Blossom

Make me, dear Lord, polite and kind, To everyone, I pray.And may I ask you how you find Yourself, dear Lord, today?

And it was at that age ... Poetry arrived in search of me. I don't know, I don't know where it came from, from winter or a river. I don't know how or when, no they were not voices, they were not words, nor silence, but from a street I was summoned, from the branches of night, abruptly from the others, among violent fires or returning alone, there I was without a face and it touched me. 

Tell me, enigmatical man, whom do you love best, your father,Your mother, your sister, or your brother?I have neither father, nor mother, nor sister, nor brother.Your friends?Now you use a word whose meaning I have never known.Your country?I do not know in what latitude it lies.Beauty?I could indeed love her, Goddess and Immortal.Gold?I hate it as you hate God.Then, what do you love, extraordinary stranger?I love the clouds the clouds that pass up thereUp there the wonderful clouds!

I stumble and fall.I weep and struggle to rise.My mom feels it all.

… the fisherman’s daughter grinding serenity in her coffee grinder.

Keep Moving...Move forwardLet go Give inDecideand just DoProgress every dayAnd make one step forward no matter what's in your wayKeep moving, till one day you wake up and you're there.

How many loved your moments of glad grace, And loved your beauty with love false or true; But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you, And loved the sorrows of your changing face.

Get it? Gender is a country, a field of signifying roses you can walk through, or wear tucked behind your ear.Eventually the flower wilts & you can pick another, or burn the field, or turn & run back across the tracks.(from "Essay on the Theory of Motion")

Shadow is the blue patch where the light doesn’t hit. It is mystery itself, and mystery is the ancients’ ultima Thule, the modern explorer’s Point of Relative Inaccessibility, that boreal point most distant from all known lands. There the twin oceans of beauty and horror meet. The great glaciers are calving. Ice that sifted to earth as snow in the time of Christ shears from the pack with a roar and crumbles to water. It could be that our instruments have not looked deeply enough. The RNA deep in the mantis’s jaw is a beautiful ribbon. Did the crawling Polyphemus moth have in its watery heart one cell, and in that cell one special molecule, and that molecule one hydrogen atom, and round that atom’s nucleus one wild, distant electron that split showed a forest, swaying?

I think you feel like, unless you're damagedyou're not deep enough or mysterious enoughor complicated enough to ever be appreciated by another.And that is deeply untrue.

One may never get to know how fast the time travels till the one gets in that position to race against the time.

Our souls fell in love long before we ever knew.

Believe me when I say: 'Out of all those around, she’s the best locksmith in town.' Her stethoscope ears know when the dials of your heart click into place.She’s been cutting keys for years.You don’t stand a chance with that flimsy case.Alas, no matter how you lock your heart— bolt, fixture, and key— she’s got nimble fingersthat pick locks for free.Padlocks and deadboltsare all in vain.Why do you even botherwith that chain?She’s way too smart. Along with ours, she’ll have your heart. And you will see that the best locksmith in town is she.

I can't think of a case where poems changed the world, but what they do is they change people's understanding of what's going on in the world.

In addition, I think religion has a chance of a look-in whenever the mind craves solace in music or poetry-- in any form of art at all. Personally, I think it is an art, the greatest one; an extension of the communication all the other arts attempt.

Self love is an oceanand your heart is a vessel. Make it full,and any excess will spill overinto the lives of the peopleyou hold dear. But you must come first.

Do you know that you can be surrounded by all these blessings, all these relationships, goodness, provisions, opportunities? But if you don't know how to turn the blessing into praise, it will turn into pride and your life will never be filled with joy because your heart has holes in it.

Poetry has its uses for despair. It can carve a shape in which a pain can seem to be; it can give one’s loss a form and dimension so that it might be loss and not simply a hopeless haunting. It can do these things for one person, or it can do them for an entire culture. But poetry is for psychological, spiritual, or emotional pain. For physical pain it is, like everything but drugs, useless.

Only poetry isn't shit.

NexusI wrote stubbornly into the evening.At the window, a giant praying mantisrubbed his monkey wrench head against the glass,begging vacantly with pale eyes;and the commas leapt at me like wormsor miniature scythes blackened with age.the praying mantis screeched louder,his ragged jaws opening into formlessness.I walked outside;the grass hissed at my heels.Up ahead in the lapping darknesshe wobbled, magnified and absurdly green,a brontosaurus, a poet.

All things are full of labour; man cannot utter it; the eye is not satisfied with seeing, nor the ear filled with hearing.

Fact is not truth, but a poet who willfully defies fact cannot achieve truth.

LEFTISTS EAT THEIR CHILDREN: The poets, artists, and radicals are murdered first once the "revolution" actually comes about.

Desire, loneliness, wind in the flowering almond—surely these are the great, the inexhaustible subjectsto which my predecessors apprenticed themselves.I hear them echo in my own heart, disguised as convention.

When boys called Bob and Bono would bring their own wild-rhythm celebration and the world would fall down in worshipful hallelujahs as it again acknowledged Ireland's capacity to create missionaries. So what if they were "the boys in the band"? They sang from a pulpit, an enormous pulpit looking down on a congregation that would knock your eyes out. A city that had produced Joyce and Beckett and Yeats, a country that had produced poet-heroes and more priests and nuns per head of population than almost any on earth was not going to spawn boys who just wanted to stand before a packed hall of gyrating teenagers and strum their guitars and sing. They had to have a message. One of salvation; they were in it to save the world. Like I said, we're teachers, missionaries.

Should I get lost, just point me in the direction of a poem.

Don't you know no one can escapethe power of creatures reaching outwith breath alone?

Must I wonder if your thoughts are of me? If you are missing me, wanting me, creating heart beats and poet-less words for me? [ i do…]

Poetry is the whispering of a truth by the shouting of the best possible lies

Courage brought me here.I desperately tried to dress myself with words.Yet excuses can no longer defend my walls.So here I am.Clueless.Defenseless.But I will tell you this,for this is all you have to know.I love you.Nothing in this life is more worthfighting for than that.

You push the TRUTH off a cliff, but it will always fly. You can submerge the TRUTH under water, but it will not drown. You can place the TRUTH in the fire, but it will survive. You can bury the TRUTH beneath the ground, but it will arise. TRUTH always prevails!

you rupturedthe love lakes of my longingand scattered the continents of my heart.

Expansion (both far and wide) is the order of the day

Death makes its own choices. Has reasoning an order has a taste…

Nothing like poetry when you lie awake at night. It keeps the old brain limber. It washes away the mud and sand that keeps on blocking up the bends.Like waves to make the pebbles dance on my old floors. And turn them into rubies and jacinths; or at any rate, good imitations.