Quotes by Poets - Page 425

Poetry...... a place for the genuine,Hands that can grasp, eyesthat can dilate, hair that can rise
Marianne Moore
How do I feel today? I feel as unfit as an unfiddle,And it is the result of a certain turbulence in the mind and an uncertain burbulence in the middle.What was it, anyway, that angry thing that flew at me?I am unused to banshees crying Boo at me.Your wife can’t be a banshee—Or can she?
Ogden Nash
Little deer, I've stuffed all the world's diseases inside you. / Your veins are thorns // and the good cells are lost in the deep dark woods / of your organs.
Pascale Petit
Nostalgia locates desire in the past where it suffers no active conflict and can be yearned toward pleasantly.
Robert Hass
And blue-lung'd combers lumbered to the kill.
Robert Lowell
...Thought lengths it, pulls an invisible world through a needle's eye one detail at a time, ...
Jennifer Grotz
SOWING LIGHTNINGSeizeBolts of lightning from the skyAnd plant them in fields of life.They will grow like tender sprouts of fire.Charge somber thoughtsWith unexpected flash,You, my lightning in the soil!
Visar Zhiti
This fellow is wise enough to play the fool;And to do that well craves a kind of wit:He must observe their mood on whom he jests,The quality of persons, and the time,And, like the haggard, check at every featherThat comes before his eye. This is a practiseAs full of labour as a wise man's artFor folly that he wisely shows is fit;But wise men, folly-fall'n, quite taint their wit.
William Shakespeare
with shrunken fingerswe ate our oranges and bread,shivering in the parked car;though we know we had neverbeen there before,we knew we had been there before.
Margaret Atwood
When a reader enters the pages of a book of poetry, he or she enters a world where dreams transform the past into knowledge made applicable to the present, and where visions shape the present into extraordinary possibilities for the future.
Aberjhani
Along the field as we came byA year ago, my love and I,The aspen over stile and stoneWas talking to itself alone.'Oh who are these that kiss and pass?A country lover and his lass;Two lovers looking to be wed;And time shall put them both to bed,But she shall lie with earth above,And he beside another love.'And sure enough beneath the treeThere walks another love with me, And overhead the aspen heavesIts rainy-sounding silver leaves;And I spell nothing in their stir,But now perhaps they speak to her,And plain for her to understandThey talk about a time at handWhen I shall sleep with clover clad,And she beside another lad.
A.E. Housman
When the lad for longing sighs,Mute and dull of cheer and pale,If at death's own door he lies,Maiden, you can heal his ail.Lovers' ills are all to buy:The wan look, the hollow tone,The hung head, the sunken eye,You can have them for your own.Buy them, buy them: eve and mornLovers' ills are all to sell.Then you can lie down forlorn;But the lover will be well.
A.E. Housman
In summer the empire of insects spreads.
Adam Zagajewski
Yet gold all is not, that doth gold seem,Nor all good knights, that shake well spear and shield:The worth of all men by their end esteem,And then praise, or due reproach them yield.
Edmund Spenser
Once upon a time, son, they used to laugh with their hearts and laugh with their eyes; but now they only laugh with their teeth, while their ice-block-cold eyes search behind my shadow. There was a time indeed they used to shake hands with their hearts; but that’s gone, son. Now they shake hands without hearts while their left hands search my empty pockets.
Gabriel Okara
Good morning, daddy!Ain't you heardThe boogie-woogie rumbleOf a dream deferred?Listen closely:You'll hear their feetBeating out and beating out a -You thinkIt's a happy beat?Listen to it closely:Ain't you heardsomething underneathlike a -What did I say?Sure,I'm happy!Take it away!Dream BoogieHey, pop!Re-bop!Mop!Y-e-a-h!
Langston Hughes
In the country whereto I goI shall not see the face of my friendNor her hair the color of sunburnt grasses;Together we shall not findThe land on whose hills bends the new moonIn air traversed of birds.What have I thought of love?I have said, "It is beauty and sorrow."I have thought that it would bring me lost delights, and splendorAs a wind out of old time . . .But there is only the evening here,And the sound of willowsNow and again dipping their long oval leaves in the water.-- from "Betrothed
Louise Bogan
A rua dos cataventosDa vez primeira em que me assassinaram,Perdi um jeito de sorrir que eu tinha.Depois, a cada vez que me mataram,Foram levando qualquer coisa minha.Hoje, dos meu cadáveres eu souO mais desnudo, o que não tem mais nada.Arde um toco de Vela amarelada,Como único bem que me ficou.Vinde! Corvos, chacais, ladrões de estrada!Pois dessa mão avaramente aduncaNão haverão de arracar a luz sagrada!Aves da noite! Asas do horror! Voejai!Que a luz trêmula e triste como um ai,A luz de um morto não se apaga nunca!
Mario Quintana
ONE WORDOne word— one stonein a cold river.One more stone—I'll need many stonesif I'm going to get over.
Olav H. Hauge
Song of myselfA child said What is the grass? fetching it to me with full hands; How could I answer the child? I do not know what it is any more than he. I guess it must be the flag of my disposition, out of hopeful green stuff woven. Or I guess it is the handkerchief of the Lord, A scented gift and remembrancer designedly dropt, Bearing the owner's name someway in the corners, that we may see and remark, and say Whose? Or I guess the grass is itself a child, the produced babe of the vegetation.
Walt Whitman
BeautyIs the fume-track of necessity. This thought Is therapeutic.If, after severalApplications, you do not findRelief, consult your family physician
Robert Penn Warren
Remember Rio de Janeiro, the size of God’s hand, sardines fleshed-open at the market, the way I entered you and moved inside? Looking down, is this the kind of density you can live with? What is the slightness of our bodies to stay, to be good at loving a second time? My mouth pretends it is an oar when it lives inside your mouth, but you are far away.
Stacie Cassarino
No one can usurp the heights...But those to whom the miseries of the worldAre misery, and will not let them rest.
John Keats
This is no occupation for an adult who can look other adults in the eye, carry his own weight, and count himself one of them.
Franz Wright
The heart's actionsare 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.
Jane Hirshfield
an English girl might well believethat time is how you spend your love.
Nick Laird
... in the world, it will be women, mostly colored and poor. women will have to bury children, and support themselves through grief.
Suheir Hammad
How do you knowyou're a girl?I'm wearing a frock.And if you take it off?I get cold, so I putit back on.If I was a boy, I don't know what I'd do.
Ivor Cutler
Voll Blüten steht der Pfirsichbaum nicht jede wächst zur Frucht sie schimmern hell wie Rosenschaum durch Blau und Wolkenflucht. Wie Blüten geh'n Gedanken auf hundert an jedem Tag -- lass' blühen, lass' dem Ding den Lauf frag' nicht nach dem Ertrag! Es muss auch Spiel und Unschuld sein und Blütenüberfluss sonst wär' die Welt uns viel zu klein und Leben kein Genuss.
Hermann Hesse
I say every dog looks like no otherbut that isn't true. Not entirely.Difference is slippery.
Mary Jo Bang
Don’t forget to collect the memories on your journey. Remember, if you only focus on your destination, you will miss out on the benefits of the journey.
Tanya R. Liverman
A teacher will be frustrated if she is only motivated to teach what she has learned. Yet, if she is motivated because of the students, then she will learn from them how to teach.
Tanya R. Liverman
Mathematicians still don’t understandthe ball our hands made, or howyour electrocuted grandparents made it possiblefor you to light my cigarettes with your eyes.It isn’t as simple as me climbing into the windowto leave six ounces of orange juiceand a doughnut by the bed, or me becomingthe sand you dug your toes in,on the beach, when you wishedto hide them from the sun and the fixed eyesof strangers, and your breath broke in wavesover my earlobe, splashing through my head, spilling outover the opposite lobe, and my first poemsunder your door in the unshaven light of dawn:Your eyes remind me of a brick wallabout to be hammered by a drunkdriver. I’m that driver. All nightI’ve swallowed you in the bar.Once I kissed the scar, stretching its sealedeyelid along your inner arm, driedraining strands of hair, full of pheromones, discoveredall your idiosyncratic passageways, so I’d knowwhere to run when the cops came.Your body is the country I’ll never return to.The man in charge of what crosses my mindwill lose fingernails, for not turning youaway at the border. But at this momentwhen sweat tingles from me, andblame is as meaningless as shooting up a cow with milk,I realise my kisses filled the halls of your bodywith smoke, and the lies camelike a season. Most drunks don’t die in accidentsthey orchestrate, and I swalloweda hand grenade that never stops exploding.
Jeffrey McDaniel
Dying is a universe of its own. 
Arlene Ang
I believe the visionaries and true reflections of society will be rewarded after their lives. Those being rewarded now are giving the public what it needs now, usually applauding its current state and clearing consciences.
Hollace M. Metzger
Ik vind het doodzonde van mijn tijd om me te verdiepen in de organische geesteswoekeringen van een dichter die me niets beters te melden heeft dan het niets, de leegte, het onverstaanbare. Het onverstaanbare heb ik thuis ook, als ik door de WC-deur heen probeer te praten met mijn vriendin. Het onzegbare, dat roeren wij thuis door de muesli. Ik wil poëzie die me meeneemt naar een wereld die ik nog niet ken, naar een inzicht dat ik nog niet had, naar een uitzicht dat ik nergens anders had kunnen vinden. Ik wil een gedicht dat zo goed is, dat ik bijna vergeet dat het, zoals elk gedicht, een taalbouwsel is – een volmaakt bedrieglijke travestie waar het grote niets doorheen schijnt, een van zijn eigen leugenachtigheid getuigende leugen van inkt. Ik wil een gedicht als een huis, dat me op één steen na laat geloven dat ik er werkelijk in zou kunnen wonen.
Ingmar Heytze
This is freedom. This is the face of faith, nobody getswhat they want. Never again are you the same. The longingis to be pure. What you get is to be changed. More and more byeach glistening minute, through which infinity threads itself.Also oblivion, of course, the aftershocks of somethingat sea. Here hands full of sand, letting it sift through in the wind, I look in and say take this, hurry. And if I listennow? Listen, I was not saying anything. It was onlysomething I did. I could not chose words. I am free to go.I cannot, of course, come back. Not to this. Never.It is a ghost posed on my lips. Here: never.
Jorie Graham
I do not know how it is elsewhere, but here, in this country, poetry is a healing, life-giving thing, and people have not lost the gift of being able to drink of its inner strength. People can be killed for poetry here—a sign of unparalleled respect—because they are still capable of living by it.
Osip Mandelstam
Words are power. The more words you know and can recognize, use, define, understand, the more power you will have as a human being... The more language you know, the more likely it is that no one can get over on you."selection from book: Our Difficult Sunlight: A Guide to Poetry, Literacy & Social Justice in Classroom & Community
Quraysh Ali Lansana & Georgia A. Popoff
Women who have been disappeared by violence are howling. The voices of disappeared women are echoing. I sing with these voices.
Kim Hyesoon
Such a small, pure object a poem could be, made of nothing but air a tiny string of letters, maybe small enough to fit in the palm of your hand. But it could blow everybody's head off.
Mary Karr
Sólo la fiebre y la poesía provocan visiones. / Sólo el amor y la memoria. / No estos caminos ni estas llanuras. / No estos laberintos.
Roberto Bolaño
If I knew what to doI'd do more than write a song for you
Criss Jami
Let This Darkness Be a Bell TowerQuiet friend who has come so far,feel how your breathing makes more space around you.Let this darkness be a bell towerand you the bell. As you ring,what batters you becomes your strength.Move back and forth into the change.What is it like, such intensity of pain?If the drink is bitter, turn yourself to wine.In this uncontainable night,be the mystery at the crossroads of your senses,the meaning discovered there.And if the world has ceased to hear you,say to the silent earth: I flow.To the rushing water, speak: I am.
Rainer Maria Rilke
Success is counted sweetest by those ne'er succeed.
Emily Dickinson
How heron comesIt is a negligence of the mindnot to notice how at duskheron comes to the pond andstands there in his death robes, perfectservant of the system, hungry, his eyesfull of attention, his wingspure light
Mary Oliver
Tom Dancer’s gift of a whitebark pine coneYou never knowtWhat opportunityttIs going to travel to you,tttOr through you.Once a friend gave metA small pine cone-ttOne of a fewtttHe found in the scatOf a grizzlytIn Utah maybe,ttOr Wyoming.tttI took it homeAnd did what I supposedtHe was sure I would do-ttI ate it,tt ThinkingHow it had traveled tThrough that roughttAnd holy body.tttIt was crisp and sweet.It was almost a prayertWithout words.ttMy gratitude, Tom Dancer, tttFor this gift of the worldtttI adore so muchttt And want to belong to.ttttAnd thank you too, great bear
Mary Oliver
We live in a modern society. Husbands and wives don'tgrow on trees, like in the old days. So wheredoes one find love? When you're sixteen it's easy, like being unleashed with a credit cardin a department store of kisses. There's the first kiss.The sloppy kiss. The peck.The sympathy kiss. The backseat smooch. The weshouldn't be doing this kiss. The but your lipstaste so good kiss. The bury me in an avalanche of tingles kiss.The I wish you'd quit smoking kiss.The I accept your apology, but you make me really madsometimes kiss. The I knowyour tongue like the back of my hand kiss. As you getolder, kisses become scarce. You'll be drivinghome and see a damaged kiss on the side of the road, with its purple thumb out. If youwere younger, you'd pull over, slide open the mouth'sred door just to see how it fits. Oh wheredoes one find love? If you rub two glances, you get a smile.Rub two smiles, you get a warm feeling.Rub two warm feelings and presto-you have a kiss. Now what? Don't invite the kiss overand answer the door in your underwear. It'll get suspiciousand stare at your toes. Don't water the kiss with whiskey. It'll turn bright pink and explode into a thousand luscious splinters, but in the morning it'll be ashamed and sneak out ofyour body without saying good-bye, and you'll remember that kiss forever by all the little cuts it lefton the inside of your mouth. You mustnurture the kiss. Turn out the lights. Notice how itilluminates the room. Hold it to your chestand wonder if the sand inside hourglasses comes from aspecial beach. Place it on the tongue's pillow, then look up the first recorded kiss in an encyclopedia: beneatha Babylonian olive tree in 1200 B.C.But one kiss levitates above all the others. Theintersection of function and desire. The I do kiss.The I'll love you through a brick wall kiss. Even when I'm dead, I'll swim through the Earth, like a mermaid of the soil, just to be next to your bones.
Jeffrey McDaniel
Once I dated a woman I only liked 43%.So I only listened to 43% of what she said.Only told the truth 43% of the time.And only kissed with 43% of my lips.Some say you can't quantify desire, attaching a number to passion isn't right, that the human heart doesn't work like that.But for me it does-I walk down the streetand numbers appear on the foreheadsof the people I look at. In bars, it's worse.With each drink, the numbers go upuntil every woman in the joint has a blurryeighty something above her eyebrows, and the next day I can only remember 17%of what actually happened. That's the problemwith booze-it screws with your math.
Jeffrey McDaniel
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!
Charles Baudelaire
Will be but corpses dressed in frocks, who cannot speak to birds or rocks.
Gary Snyder
No one could say the stories were uselessfor as the tongue clackedfive or forty fingers stitchedcorn was grated from the huskpathwork was piecedor the darning was done...(from 'The Storyteller Poems')
Liz Lochhead
Sevgili Güllük;Yastık kanepenin üzerine konur. Tekme atılarak düşürülür o. Pazar günleri kuru fasulye yenir. Karşılıklı, alt alta, üst üste ve daha değişik şekillerde durulur. Islak vardır. Portakalın içi de dışı gibi portakal rengidir. Köstebeklerin uçma kabiliyeti bulunmaz. Kamyonlar yük taşırlar. Kaza olur. Kaza yaparlar. Süleyman, Çetin, Atıf, Kemal, Necdet gibi erkek isimleri; Zeynep, Burçak, Burçak ve Burçak gibi kız isimleri vardır. Patates cinsleri vardır; kızartmalık ve haşlamalık. Çeşitli ebatlarda düğün pastaları olur. Muz olur.
A.H. Muhsin Ünlü
Critics write out of intellectual exercise, not poets. Poets write straight from the heart.
Erica Jong
Most people in this country are looking for literature that is useful. They feel that just exploring their feelings is good enough - they should be reading about leveraged buy-outs or how to get thin. We live in a culture that is so absolutely, madly focused on commercialism and on creating money and completely turned away from any other kind of creative value. People don't generally turn to poetry unless they're bereaved or have fallen in love. Or in adolescence, when their feelings are very strong and turbulent. I think most of us are dying for lack of spirit in this culture.
Erica Jong
I live my life in growing orbits which move out over the things of the world.
Rainer Maria Rilke
The poet dreams of the mountainSometimes I grow weary of the days, with all their fits and starts.I want to climb some old gray mountains, slowly, takingThe rest of my lifetime to do it, resting often, sleepingUnder the pines or, above them, on the unclothed rocks.I want to see how many stars are still in the skyThat we have smothered for years now, a century at least.I want to look back at everything, forgiving it all,And peaceful, knowing the last thing there is to know.All that urgency! Not what the earth is about!How silent the trees, their poetry being of themselves only.I want to take slow steps, and think appropriate thoughts.In ten thousand years, maybe, a piece of the mountain will fall.
Mary Oliver
The sweetness of dogs (fifteen) What do you say, Percy? I am thinkingof sitting out on the sand to watchthe moon rise. Full tonight.So we goand the moon rises, so beautiful it makes me shudder, makes me think abouttime and space, makes me takemeasure of myself: one iotapondering heaven. Thus we sit,I thinking how grateful I am for the moon’s perfect beauty and also, oh! How richit is to love the world. Percy, meanwhile, leans against me and gazes up intomy face. As though I werehis perfect moon.
Mary Oliver
On the beach, at dawn:Four small stones clearlyHugging each other.How many kinds of loveMight there be in the world,And how many formations might they makeAnd who am I everTo imagine I could knowSuch a marvelous business?When the sun brokeIt poured willingly its lightOver the stonesThat did not move, not at all,Just as, to its always generous term,It shed its light on me,My own body that loves, Equally, to hug another body.
Mary Oliver
In your handsThe dog, the donkey, surely they knowtThey are alive.Who would argue otherwise?But now, after years of consideration,tI am getting beyond that.What about the sunflowers? What abouttThe tulips, and the pines?Listen, all you have to do is start andtThere’ll be no stopping.What about mountains? What about watertSlipping over rocks?And speaking of stones, what abouttThe little ones you can Hold in your hands, their heartbeatstSo secret, so hidden it may take yearsBefore, finally, you hear them?
Mary Oliver