Poetry Quotes - Page 9

…be awake to the Life that is loving you andsing your prayer, laugh your prayer, dance your prayer, runand weep and sweat your prayer,sleep your prayer, eat your prayer, paint, sculpt, hammer, and read your prayer, sweep, dig, rake, drive and hoe your prayer,garden and farm and build and clean your prayer,wash, iron, vacuum, sew, embroider and pickle your prayer,compute, touch, bend and fold but never deleteor mutilate your prayer.Learn and play your prayer, work and rest your prayer,fast and feast your prayer, argue, talk, whisper, listen and shout your prayer,groan and moan and spit and sneeze your prayer,swim and hunt and cook your prayer,digest and become your prayer,release and recover your prayer,breathe your prayer, be your prayer

You broke meI’m trying to put allthe piecesback togetherThe processis takinglonger than expected.

Most of the poems I write take 5 minutes, but the words can give a lifetime of relief. Many people that have read my book say it helped them with their grief.

That you were able to walk away, gives me my answer as plain as day.

IMPROVIDENCEThe other lives I might have ledAll now might as well beDead. Survived by no one.Barren, without issue of any sort:This withered bud, failedIn art and love. With no time leftTo change my course. But time enoughfor infinite remorse.

My mind: a thousand hungry daughters,my harlot heritage.Marbles: lost, no rescue search.Your heart: blooming thorns,and a stolen grocery cart.

Into my heart an air that killsFrom yon far country blows:What are those blue remembered hills,What spires, what farms are those?That is the land of lost content,I see it shining plain,The happy highways where I wentAnd cannot come

Pleasured equallyIn seeking as in finding,Each detail minding,Old Walt went seekingAnd finding.

We aim to bemen who’ll makeour mothers proud,but we end upmaking them cry,and are onlyslightly betterthan our fathers,at best

Gretel in Darkness:This is the world we wanted.All who would have seen us deadare dead. I hear the witch's crybreak in the moonlight through a sheetof sugar: God rewards.Her tongue shrivels into gas....Now, far from women's armsAnd memory of women, in our father's hutwe sleep, are never hungry.Why do I not forget?My father bars the door, bars harmfrom this house, and it is years.No one remembers. Even you, my brother,summer afternoons you look at me as thoughyou meant to leave,as though it never happened.But I killed for you. I see armed firs,the spires of that gleaming kiln--Nights I turn to you to hold mebut you are not there.Am I alone? Spieshiss in the stillness, Hanselwe are there still, and it is real, real,that black forest, and the fire in earnest.

Man would not be man if his dreams did not exceed his grasp. ... Like John Donne, man lies in a close prison, yet it is dear to him. Like Donne's, his thoughts at times overleap the sun and pace beyond the body. If I term humanity a slime mold organism it is because our present environment suggest it. If I remember the sunflower forest it is because from its hidden reaches man arose. The green world is his sacred center. In moments of sanity he must still seek refuge there. ... If I dream by contrast of the eventual drift of the star voyagers through the dilated time of the universe, it is because I have seen thistledown off to new worlds and am at heart a voyager who, in this modern time, still yearns for the lost country of his birth.

We both believe, and disbelieve a hundred times an hour, which keeps believing nimble.

Our life is a faint tracing on the surface of mystery. The surface of mystery is not smooth, any more than the planet is smooth; not even a single hydrogen atom is smooth, let alone a pine. Nor does it fit together; not even the chlorophyll and hemoglobin molecules are a perfect match, for, even after the atom of iron replaces the magnesium, long streamers of disparate atoms trail disjointedly from the rims of the molecule’s loops. Freedom cuts both ways. Mystery itself is as fringed and intricate at the shape of the air at times. Forays into mystery cut bays and fine fjords, but the forested mainland itself is implacable both in its bulk and in its most filigreed fringe of detail.

... in the world, it will be women, mostly colored and poor. women will have to bury children, and support themselves through grief.

...the feelings that pass between us are deeper than fleshly touches...

i don't want to hate the presidenti don't want to go to harvardi don't want to win the pulitzer prizei just want to sit in my bathtuband think about relationships i will never havewith people i will never meetand then go lay in my bedwith a magnifying glassand count all the stiches in my sheetsuntil i fall asleepand wake upto repeat again.

Don’t pay attention to those who offer too much.

All she captures is a moment and what she calls it is a memory,Sometimes, it is assumptions that we use; all we need is a theory,Because you don’t know what is there in the future,And all you need is a vision to make a perfect picture.I feel that I have known you for a century,And whatever she calls is a memory.

The outside is the only place we can truly be inside the world.

Always the wild child, conceived in flames, born of fire. Drawn to the forbidden, witch, warlock, burning stones. Her blood is made of moonlight; part dark, part light. Her heart, it's a sword; fiercely loyal and will fight to the death for those whom she loves. You can throw her in the fire, she always returns as a flame: the fervor is her anchor, her safe-haven... her blood.

To wake the soul by tender strokes of art,To raise the genius, and to mend the heart

I wanted to explore more of us and lose myself, I wanted it to be you and no one else" AP

Yes You Are!Like the Blossoming rose,Like the Rays of hope.Like a deer in the forest,Like an athlete full of zest.Like a lamp in temple,Like the life feeling ample.Like the feel of the dawn,Like the grace of the swan.Like the melody of sitar,Like the rage of guitar.Like a group of angels in the sky,Like the pot that makes you high.Like the peacock's dance,Like she is the romance.Like the silent talk,Like the wine from Medoc.Like the colors of life,Like the music from the fife.Like the calmness of the cold windLike the beauty of the hind.

The IdealThis is where I came from.I passed this way.This should not be shameful Or hard to say.A self is a self. It is not a screen. A person should respectWhat he has been. This is my past Which I shall not discard. This is the ideal.This is hard.

Is this what I am doing now?Watching the currents, passagesof life around me.I am not looking for books to explainmore with their words, butlistening to poets with their imagery, symbols, listening to my own feelings as Icontinue my pilgrimage in this life,pausing, watching, catching glimpsesof deeper down things.-Deeper Down Things

It took me a long time to realiseThat mothers are women who carry you And not necessarily in their womb.

My hope, my heaven, my trust must be,My gentle guide, in following thee.

Seeing thou hast now given me the way, I will proceed to speak before thee: for our mother, of whom thou hast told me that she is young, draw now nigh unto age.

Poetry lit fire in the vast forest of memories within you.

I have been happy, though in a dream.I have been happy-and I love the theme:Dreams! in their vivid colouring of lifeAs in that fleeting, shadowy, misty strife

In the new faith, there is only one commandment. It is this commandment, and this commandment alone, that must be followed to end the times of suffering, which are soon to come. FORSAKE USURY.

Sometimes poets expect me to think far deeper than I'm willing to dig.

John Keats / John Keats / John / Please put your scarf on.

I think there is a song out there to describe just about any situation.

Wilted or in bloom,taking or lending daylight,the world transitions.

Sun is a hearthstone, a merry-go-round of extinguished hearthstones.

I am too alone in the world, and yet not alone enoughto make every moment holy.I am too tiny in this world, and not tiny enoughjust to lie before you like a thing,shrewd and secretive.I want my own will, and I want simply to be with my will,as it goes toward action;and in those quiet, sometimes hardly moving times,when something is coming near,I want to be with those who know secret thingsor else alone.I want to be a mirror for your whole body,and I never want to be blind, or to be too oldto hold up your heavy and swaying picture.I want to unfold.I don’t want to stay folded anywhere,because where I am folded, there I am a lie.and I want my grasp of things to betrue before you. I want to describe myselflike a painting that I looked atclosely for a long time,like a saying that I finally understood,like the pitcher I use every day,like the face of my mother,like a shipthat carried methrough the wildest storm of all.

We must listen to poets.

A poet is an artist that paints pictures by mixing thought, imagination, and emotion with words.

I have no riches but my thoughts, Yet these are wealth enough for me

Hearing a crow with no mouthCry in the deepDarkness of the night,I feel a longing forMy father before he was born.

An anaesthetic is a poet-killer.

They surrounded me, bare me. Their fingers like tentacles and their desires like knives. Their fingers traced my secrets and their desires carved my skin.

Ho! Ho! Ho! To the bottle I goTo heal my heart and drown my woeRain may fall, and wind may blowAnd many miles be still to goBut under a tall tree will I lieAnd let the clouds go sailing by

You were the poem I never knew how to write because no words could describe the wind you cannot see, but feel.

the onewho will jolt awakeall the unwrittenthe unsungand the unlived in me. i am waitingfor him.

The SleepingI have imagined all this:In 1940 my parents were in loveAnd living in the loft on West 10thAbove Mark Rothko who painted cabbage rosesOn their bedroom walls the night they got married.I can guess why he did it.My mother’s hair was the color of yellow applesAnd she wore a velvet hat with her pajamas.I was not born yet. I was remote as starlight.It is hard for me to imagine thatMy parents made love in a roomful of rosesAnd I wasn’t there.But now I am. My mother is blushing.This is the wonderful thing about art.It can bring back the dead. It can wake the sleepingAs it might have late that nightWhen my father and mother made love above RothkoWho lay in the dark thinking Roses, Roses, Roses.

What can be explained is not poetry.

She was afraid of heightsbut she was much more afraid of never flying.

In most poetic expressions of patriotism, it is impossible to distinguish what is one of the greatest human virtues from the worst human vice, collective egotism.

you wanted it all to make senseand you wanted the most complicated answer,but the answer is simple.just be.

John O’Donohue gave voice to the connection between beauty and those edges of life—thresholds was the word he loved—where the fullness of reality becomes more stark and more clear. If you go back to the etymology of the word “threshold,” it comes from “threshing,” which is to separate the grain from the husk. So the threshold, in a way, is a place where you move into more critical and challenging and worthy fullness. There are huge thresholds in every life. You know that, for instance, if you are in the middle of your life in a busy evening, fifty things to do and you get a phone call that somebody you love is suddenly dying, it takes ten seconds to communicate that information. But when you put the phone down, you are already standing in a different world. Suddenly everything that seems so important before is all gone and now you are thinking of this. So the given world that we think is there and the solid ground we are on is so tentative. And a threshold is a line which separates two territories of spirit, and very often how we cross is the key thing.

]sing to usthe one with violets in her lap]mostly]goes astray

Don't kiss me if you're afraid of thunder. My life is a storm.

things keep falling in and out of place.this is the universe's way of taking care of me.

she slammed the door andwas gone.I looked at the closed doorand at the doorknoband strangelyI didn't feelalone.

Christians we cannot be allowed to be fractured at a time like this. There are more of us, there are more of light in us than in the agents of darkness.

There's no retirement for an artist,its your way of living so theres no end to it.

This is the way the world endsNot with a bang but a whimper.

Listen closely. Even the trees exhale sweet love songs that roll off their boughs and echo out to all of creation. Love is always in the air.