Quotes by Poets - Page 438

I watched the spinning stars, grateful, sad and proud, as only a man who has outlived his destiny and realizes he might yet forge himself another, can be.

Roger Zelazny

Songwriting and poetry are so commonly birthed from underdogs because one can make even the ugliest situations admirable, or more beautiful than the beautiful situations - they are the most graceful media in which the lines of society are distorted.

Criss Jami

After great pain, a formal feeling comes – The Nerves sit ceremonious, like Tombs – The stiff Heart questions was it He, that bore,And Yesterday, or Centuries before?The Feet, mechanical, go round – Of Ground, or Air, or Ought – A Wooden way Regardless grown, A Quartz contentment, like a stone – This is the Hour of Lead – Remembered, if outlived, As Freezing persons, recollect the Snow – First – Chill – then Stupor – then the letting go –

Emily Dickinson

A Robin Redbreast in a CagePuts all Heaven in a Rage.A dove house fill’d with doves and pigeonsShudders Hell thro’ all its regions.A Dog starv’d at his Master’s GatePredicts the ruin of the State.A Horse misus’d upon the RoadCalls to Heaven for Human blood.Each outcry of the hunted HareA fiber from the Brain does tear.

William Blake

I sat, a solitary man,In a crowded London shop,An open book and empty cupOn the marble table-top.While on the shop and street I gazedMy body of a sudden blazed;And twenty minutes more or lessIt seemed, so great my happiness,That I was blessed and could bless.

W.B. Yeats

This cruel age has deflected me,like a river from this course.Strayed from its familiar shores,my changeling life has flowedinto a sister channel.How many spectacles I've missed:the curtain rising without me,and falling too. How many friendsI never had the chance to meet.

Anna Akhmatova

Little CinderGirl, they can't understand you.You rise from the as-heap in a blazeand only then do they recognize you as their one true love.While you pray beneath your mother's tree you carrve a phoenix into your palmwth aa hazel twig and coal;every night she devours more of you.You used to believe in angels.Now you believe in the makeover;if you can't get the grime off your faceand your foot into a size six heelwho will ever bother to notice you?The kettle and the broom sear in your grasp,snap into fragments. The turtledoves sing,"There's blood within the shoe."You deserve the palace, you think, as you signalthe pigeons to attack, approve the barrel filled with red-hot nails.Its great hearth beckons, and the prince's flagrises crimson in the angry sun.He will love you for the heat you generate,for the flames you ignite around you,though he encase your tiny feet in glassto keep them from scorching the ground.

Jeannine Hall Gailey

O words are poor receipts for what time hath stole away

John Clare

The rain set early in tonight,The sullen wind was soon awake,It tore the elm-tops down for spite,And did its best to vex the lake:I listened with heart fit to break.When glided in Porphyria; straightShe shut the cold out and the storm,And kneeled and made the cheerless grateBlaze up and all the cottage warm;

Robert Browning

My words are the garment of what I shall never be Like the tucked sleeve of a one-armed boy.

W.S. Merwin

Who you are contributes to your poetry in a number of important ways, but you shouldn't identify with your poems so closely that when they are cut, you're the one that bleeds.

Dorianne Laux

This fire that we call Loving is too strong for human minds. But just right for human souls.

Aberjhani

How to Write a PoemCatch the airaround the butterfly.

Katerina Stoykova-Klemer

I stalk certain words... I catch them in mid-flight, as they buzz past, I trap them, clean them, peel them, I set myself in front of the dish, they have a crystalline texture to me, vibrant, ivory, vegetable, oily, like fruit, like algae, like agates, like olives... I stir them, I shake them, I drink them, I gulp them down, I mash them, I garnish them... I leave them in my poem like stalactites, like slivers of polished wood, like coals, like pickings from a shipwreck, gifts from the waves... Everything exists in the word.

Pablo Neruda

I wander through each chartered street,Near where the chartered Thames does flow;A mark in every face I meet,Marks of weakness, marks of woe.In every cry of every man,In every infant’s cry of fear,In every voice, in every ban,The mind-forged manacles I hear:How the chimney-sweeper’s cryEvery blackening church appals,And the hapless soldier’s sighRuns in blood down palace-walls.But most, through midnight streets I hearHow the youthful harlot’s curseBlasts the new-born infant’s tear,And blights with plagues the marriage-hearse.

William Blake

Reminiscing in the drizzle of Portland, I notice the ring that’s landed on your finger, a massiveinsect of glitter, a chandelier shining at the endof a long tunnel. Thirteen years ago, you hid the hurtin your voice under a blanket and said there’s two kindsof women—those you write poems aboutand those you don’t. It’s true. I never brought youa bouquet of sonnets, or served you haiku in bed.My idea of courtship was tapping Jane’s Addictionlyrics in Morse code on your window at three A.M., whiskey doing push-ups on my breath. But I workedwithin the confines of my character, castas the bad boy in your life, the Magellanof your dark side. We don’t have a past so muchas a bunch of electricity and liquor, powernever put to good use. What we had togethermakes it sound like a virus, as if we caughtone another like colds, and desire was merelya symptom that could be treated with soupand lots of sex. Gliding beside you now, I feel like the Benjamin Franklin of monogamy, as if I invented it, but I’m still not immuneto your waterfall scent, still haven’t developedantibodies for your smile. I don’t know how longregret existed before humans stuck a word on it.I don’t know how many paper towels it would taketo wipe up the Pacific Ocean, or why the lightof a candle being blown out travels fasterthan the luminescence of one that’s just been lit, but I do know that all our huffing and puffinginto each other’s ears—as if the brain was a trickbirthday candle—didn’t make the silenceany easier to navigate. I’m sorry all the kissesI scrawled on your neck were writtenin disappearing ink. Sometimes I thought of youso hard one of your legs would pop outof my ear hole, and when I was sleeping, you’d pressyour face against the porthole of my submarine.I’m sorry this poem has taken thirteen yearsto reach you. I wish that just once, instead of skiddingoff the shoulder blade’s precipice and joyridingover flesh, we’d put our hands away like chocolateto be saved for later, and deciphered the calligraphyof each other’s eyelashes, translated a paragraphfrom the volumes of what couldn’t be said.

Jeffrey McDaniel

Thus, though we cannot make our sun Stand still, yet we will make him run.

Andrew Marvell

I am suggesting that the radical of poetry lies not in theresolution of doubts but in their proliferation

C.D. Wright

The first rose on my rose-tree Budded, bloomed, and shattered, During sad days when to me Nothing mattered. Grief of grief has drained me clean; Still it seems a pity No one saw,—it must have been Very pretty.

Edna St. Vincent Millay

Sweetest smile is made saddest tear-drop!

Edwin Arnold

I regret to say I'munable to reply to your unexpressed desires.

Harryette Mullen

First, I thought, almost despairing,This must crush my spirit now;Yet I bore it, and am bearing-Only do not ask me how.

Heinrich Heine

What Youth deemed crystal, Age finds out was dew

Robert Browning

Your war drum ain't / louder than this breath.

Suheir Hammad

so much dependsupona red wheelbarrowglazed with rainwaterbeside the whitechickens.

William Carlos Williams

It's important to have your private enjoyments because sometimes that's all we have.

Kay Ryan

Isn’t it time that these most ancient sorrows of ours grew fruitful? Time that we tenderly loosed ourselves from the loved one, and, unsteadily, survived: the way the arrow, suddenly all vector, survives the string to be more than itself. For abiding is nowhere.

Rainer Maria Rilke

If we surrenderedto earth’s intelligencewe could rise up rooted, like trees.Instead we entangle ourselvesin knots of our own makingand struggle, lonely and confused.So like children, we begin again...to fall,patiently to trust our heaviness.Even a bird has to do thatbefore he can fly.

Rainer Maria Rilke

This poetry. I never know what I'm going to say.I don't plan it.When I'm outside the saying of it,I get very quiet and rarely speak at all.

Jalaluddin Rumi

সারাটি রাত্রি তারাটির সাথে তারাটিরই হয় কথা,আমাদের মুখ সারাটি রাত্রি মাটির বুকের 'পরে!

Jibanananda Das

But far more numerous was the herd of such,Who think too little, and who talk too much.

John Dryden

Errors, like straws, upon the surface flow; He who would search for pearls, must dive below.

John Dryden

a bruise, bluein the muscle, youimpinge upon me.As bone hugs the ache home, soI'm vexed to love you, your bodythe shape of returns, your hair a torsoof light, your heatI must have, your openingI'd eat, each momentof that soft-finned fruit,inverted fountain in which I don't see me.

Li-Young Lee

All shadows of clouds the sun cannot hide like the moon cannot stop oceanic tide;but a hidden star can still be smiling at night's black spell on darkness, beguiling

Munia Khan

We real cool. We Left school. We Lurk late. We Strike straight. We Sing sin. We Thin gin. We Jazz June. We Die soon.

Gwendolyn Brooks

ConnubialBecause with alarming accuracy she’d been identifying patterns I was unaware of—this tic, that tendency, like the way I've mastered the language of intimacy in order to conceal how I felt— I knew I was in danger of being terribly understood.

Stephen Dunn

A lover goes toward his beloved as enthusiastically as a schoolboy leaving his books, but when he leaves his girlfriend, he feels as miserable as the schoolboy on his way to school. (Act 2, scene 2)

William Shakespeare

Edgar Allan Poe

sometimes when everything seems atits worstwhen all conspiresand gnawsand the hours, days, weeksyearsseem wasted – stretched there upon my bedin the darklooking upward at the ceilingi get what many will consider anobnoxious thought:it’s still nice to beBukowski.

Charles Bukowski

February. Get ink, shed tears.Write of it, sob your heart out, sing,While torrential slush that roarsBurns in the blackness of the spring.Go hire a buggy. For six grivnas,Race through the noice of bells and wheelsTo where the ink and all you grievingAre muffled when the rainshower falls.To where, like pears burnt black as charcoal,A myriad rooks, plucked from the trees,Fall down into the puddles, hurlDry sadness deep into the eyes.Below, the wet black earth shows through,With sudden cries the wind is pitted,The more haphazard, the more trueThe poetry that sobs its heart out.

Boris Pasternak

Fireflies in the GardenBy Robert Frost 1874–1963 Here come real stars to fill the upper skies, And here on earth come emulating flies, That though they never equal stars in size, (And they were never really stars at heart) Achieve at times a very star-like start. Only, of course, they can't sustain the part.

Robert Frost

It was not death, for I stood up,And all the dead lie down;It was not night, for all the bellsPut out their tongues, for noon.It was not frost, for on my fleshI felt siroccos crawl,Nor fire, for just my marble feetCould keep a chancel cool.And yet it tasted like them all;The figures I have seenSet orderly, for burial,Reminded me of mine,As if my life were shavenAnd fitted to a frame,And could not breathe without a key;And I was like midnight, some,When everything that ticked has stopped,And space stares, all around,Or grisly frosts, first autumn morns,Repeal the beating ground.But most like chaos,--stopless, cool,Without a chance or spar,--Or even a report of landTo justify despair.

Emily Dickinson

I lock my door upon myself, And bar them out; but who shall wall Self from myself, most loathed of all?

Christina Rossetti

I am obnoxious to each carping tongue/ Who says my hand a needle better fits./ A poet's pen all scorn I should thus wrong/ For such despite they cast on female wits;/ If what I do prove well, it won't advance,/ They'll say it's stolen, or else, it was by chance.

Anne Bradstreet

And must I then, indeed, Pain, live with youall through my life?-sharing my fire, my bed,Sharing-oh, worst of all things!-the same head?-And, when I feed myself, feeding you too?

Edna St. Vincent Millay

Oh! kangaroos, sequins, chocolate sodas! / You really are beautiful! Pearls, / harmonicas, jujubes, aspirins!

Frank O'Hara

And marbled clouds go scudding byThe many-steepled London sky.

John Betjeman

I am sore wounded but not slainI will lay me down and bleed a whileAnd then rise up to fight again

John Dryden

Even this late it happens:the coming of love, the coming of light.

Mark Strand

Ali ipak uz mene se može, mada je neobično, Sa mnom je opasno hteti, ja nikad ne odustajem.

Miroslav Antić

Nothing is more natural than mutual misunderstanding; the contrary is always surprising. I believe that one never agrees on anything except by mistake, and that all harmony among human beings is the happy fruit of an error.

Paul Valéry

Pirate Captain Jim"Walk the plank," says Pirate Jim"But Captain Jim, I cannot swim.""Then you must steer us through the gale.""But Captain Jim, I cannot sail.""Then down with the galley slaves you go.""But Captain Jim, I cannot row.""Then you must be the pirate's clerk.""But Captain Jim, I cannot work.

Shel Silverstein

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.

Beau Taplin

You will come away bruised.You will come away bruisedbut this will give you poetry.

Yrsa Daley-Ward

so much of the world is plunged in darkness and chaos...So ring the bells that still can ringForget your perfect offeringThere is a crack in everythingThat’s how the light gets in.

Leonard Cohen

Who could have foretoldthe heart grows oldfrom touching others

Leonard Cohen

The grass as bristly and stout as chives and me wondering when the ground will break and me wondering how anything fragile survives

Anne Sexton

My love runs by like a day in June, And he makes no friends of sorrows. He'll tread his galloping rigadoon In the pathway of the morrows. He'll live his days where the sunbeams start, Nor could storm or wind uproot him. My own dear love, he is all my heart, -- And I wish somebody'd shoot him.

Dorothy Parker

You are ice and fire The touch of you burns my hands like snow

Amy Lowell

For books are more than books, they are the lifeThe very heart and core of ages past,The reason why men lived and worked and died,The essence and quintessence of their lives.

Amy Lowell

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