Poetry Quotes - Page 14

Partial skinning may be less painful, perhaps delay unpleasantness, how pain set in breasts, back, and belly offers less agony, some reprieve, while the skinning of fingers, nose, cheeks and lips feels like spears. . .

Cathleen Margaret

I just didn’t get it—even with the teacher holding an orange (the earth) in one handand a lemon (the moon) in the other,her favorite student (the sun) standing behind her with a flashlight.I just couldn’t grasp it—this whole citrus universe, these bumpy planets revolving so slowlyno one could even see themselves moving.I used to think if I could only concentrate hard enoughI could be the one person to feel what no one else could,sense a small tug from the ground, a sky shift, the earth changing gears.Even though I was only one mini-speck on a speck,even though I was merely a pinprick in one goosebump on the orange,I was sure then I was the most specially perceptive, perceptively sensitive.I was sure then my mother was the only mother to snap,“The world doesn’t revolve around you!”The earth was fragile and mostly water,just the way the orange was mostly water if you peeled it,just the way I was mostly water if you peeled me.Looking back on that third grade science demonstration,I can understand why some people gave up on fame or religion or cures—especially people who have an understandingof the excruciating crawl of the world,who have a well-developed sense of spatial reasoningand the tininess that it is to be one of us.But not me—even now I wouldn’t mind being god, the forcewho spins the planets the way I spin a globe, a basketball, a yoyo.I wouldn’t mind being that teacher who chooses the fruit,or that favorite kid who gives the moon its glow.

Walk and loveWe're walking in loveFor the walk of love

I am the eye that beholds... And I am the dreamer that paints the stars in the night sky... For I am the one they call artist, and you call Love.

....my sacred landscape is the foothills of the stars - I go there often to sleep ...

You have constellationsgrowing under your skin.starlight in the blood spilledwhen they stole your feathers

I am made of poetry and other things that people don't really care about at all.

Karishma Magvani

I am skin, but underneath livesfire and stars and wild!

I would rather dance alone under the stars than spend a lifetime hiding behind the moon.

I have lost my smile,but don't worry.The dandelion has it.

Thich Nhat Hanh

Some days I’mtrying to forcea smile sohard it feelslike I mightshit my pants

And tonight the stars again ask me your name?And I just smile, playing the guessing game!

For the Wife Beater's WifeWith blue irises her face is blossomed. BlueCircling to yellow, circling to brown on her cheeks.The long bone of her jaw untrackedShe hides in our kitchen.He sleeps it off next door.Her chicken legs tucked under herShe's frantic with lies, animatedBefore the swirling smoke.On her cigarette she leaves red prints, redLike a cut on the white cup.Like a skin she pulls her sweater around her.She's cold,She brings the cold in with her.In our kitchen she hides.He sleeps it off next door, his greatBelly heaving with booze.Again and again she tells the storyAs if the details ever changed,As if blows to the face were somehowDifferent beating to beating.We reach for her but can't help.She retreats into her cold love of himAnd looks across the table at usAs if across a sea.Next door he claws out of sleep.She says she thinks she'll do somethingAfter all, with her hair tonight.

A picture in a book, a lynching. The bland faces of men who watcha Christ go up in flames, smiling,as if he were a hookedfish, a felled antelope, some wild thing tied to boards and burned.His charred bodygives off light--a haloburns out of him. His face is scorched featureless; the hair matted to the scalp like feathers. One man stands with his hand on his hip,another with his armslung over the shoulder of a friend,as if this moment were large enoughto hold affection.

They have the guns, we have the poets. Therefore, we will win.

When I was achild my worldwasn’t blackand white,it was grey,until I gotbeat upenough timesto realizemy skin wasbeige, anddifferent

Look where we worship.

Deb and I were married on a snowy night - wind cross-wove a veil of snow for her then threw confetti at us as we left the lighted church...

The most carefully crafted language in our culture tends to be poetry. And poetry at its finest moments subverts our best attempts at hiding from reality...The poetry of liturgy has just this power. The liturgy contains words that have been shaped and crafted over the centuries. It is formal speech. It is public poetry. As such it reaches into us to reveal not only the unnamed reality of our lives but the God who created us...But even when the words of the liturgy are not literally biblical words, the words, like all truthful words, work on us over time, like a steady, unrelenting stream slowly reshapes the banks of a river. The words do something to us even when we're not paying attention.

The weight of wait.

Cameron Conaway

For while the tired waves, vainly breaking, Seem here no painful inch to gain, Far back, through creeks and inlets making, Comes silent, flooding in, the main. And not by eastern windows only, When daylight comes, comes in the light; In front the sun climbs slow, how slowly! But westward, look, the land is bright!

Arthur Hugh Clough

Lay a golden egg.After you built a nest,You wait for a leg.And you land next. Now you hope and pray.Expect for the best. Go on with no delay. Get it right at last.

Ana Claudia Antunes

I am much too alone in this world, yet not alone enough.

Rainer Maria Rilke

A poet is a nightingale who sits in darkness and sings to cheer its own solitude with sweet sounds; his auditors are as men entranced by the melody of an unseen musician, who feel that they are moved and softened, yet know not whence or why.

Percy Bysshe Shelley

I place solitude in a frame on my desk and call it, the one I love.

Kelli Russell Agodon

But give thanks, at least, that you still have Frost's poems; and when you feel the need of solitude, retreat to the companionship of moon, water, hills and trees. Retreat, he reminds us, should not be confused with escape. And take these poems along for good luck!

I choose solitude over cold kisses. If it isn't love, it is poison.

Though solitude, endured too long,Bids youthful joys too soon decay,Makes mirth a stranger to my tongue,And overclouds my noon of day;When kindly thoughts that would have way,Flow back discouraged to my breast;I know there is, though far away,A home where heart and soul may rest.Warm hands are there, that, clasped in mine,The warmer heart will not belie;While mirth, and truth, and friendship shineIn smiling lip and earnest eye.The ice that gathers round my heartMay there be thawed; and sweetly, then,The joys of youth, that now depart,Will come to cheer my soul again.

O take me from the busy crowd,I cannot bear the noise!For Nature's voice is never loud;I seek for quiet joys.The book I love is everywhere,And not in idle words;The book I love is known to all,And better lore affords.

There is a charm in Solitude that cheersA feeling that the world knows nothing ofA green delight the wounded mind endearsAfter the hustling world is broken off

In mid-wood silence, thus, how sweet to be;Where all the noises, that on peace intrude,Come from the chittering cricket, bird, and bee,Whose songs have charms to sweeten solitude.

I hate the very noise of troublous man Who did and does me all the harm he can. Free from the world I would a prisoner be And my own shadow all my company.

I told her it takesa lot of solitude to write a poem.She told me it takes a lot of solitudeto die.

Now the New Year reviving old Desires,The thoughtful Soul to Solitude retires.

From our solitudewe shall create,forge songs ,pour in the reflectionof the stars and refresh the mindabout the silk-ridden roads that wait for them who have forgotten to feel.

Wrong solitude vinegars the soul, right solitude oils it.

Jane Hirshfield

I avoid the looming visitor,Flee him adroitly around corners,Hating him, wishing him well;Lest if he confront me I be forced to say what is in no wise true:That he is welcome; that I am unoccupied;And forced to sit while the potted roses wilt in the crate or the sonnet coolsBending a respectful nose above such dried philosophiesAs have hung in wreaths from the rafters of my house since I was a child.Some trace of kindliness in this, no doubt,There may be.But not enough to keep a bird alive.There is a flaw amounting to a fissureIn such behaviour.

Edna St. Vincent Millay

To be alone was my best interest because needing myself was looking for you

Nicola An

For I have hedged me with a thorny hedge, I live alone, I look to die alone: Yet sometimes, when a wind sighs through the sedge, Ghosts of my buried years, and friends come back, My heart goes sighing after swallows flown On sometime summer's unreturning track.

Christina Rossetti

I want to be intoxicated by the darkened ether of midnight, running through my fingers as sparkling stardust. I crave the taste of the ocean's salty tears, as her temperamental tides crash and break against the rocks. I yearn for the sweet scent of sun on my skin and the earthy musk of dirt giving way under my bare feet. I want to lay naked in golden fields, as i gaze up at an endless sky, dreaming my dreams, as Mother Nature's love washes over me like spiritual sunshine.

The mass starts into a million suns;Earths round each sun with quick explosions burst,And second planets issue from the first.[The first concept of a 'big bang' theory of the universe.]

The world is full of poetry. ~ The air is living with its spirit; and the waves dance to the music of its melodies, and sparkle in its brightness.

To live day by dayIs not to live at all.

Conrad Kent Rivers

How much living have you done?From it the patterns that you weaveAre imaged:Your own life is your totem pole,Your yard of cloth,Your living.How much loving have you done?How full and free your giving?For living is but lovingAnd loving only giving.

Georgia Douglas Johnson

The glamorous life is a facade, a frauda farce of frivolous triteThe storybook is blank insideChivalry has died

Donato DiCristino

Blankly expressing oneself can be stronger than words.

Nothing conceivable is so petty, so insipid, so crowded with paltry interests, in one word, so anti-poetic, as the life of a man in the United States.

Alexis de Tocqueville

We should’ve thrown fucking riots the first time they had us ring up and bag our owngroceries

Forever, if she promises to never part the ocean where the river sings.

All writers are manipulative liars." Jack O. Savage, The Poet

Hunter S. Jones

My Love wakes in a puddle of sunlight.Her hands asleep beside her.Her hair draped on the lawnlike a mantle of cloth.I give her my lifefor our love is wholeI sing her beauty in my soul.

Thus many a melody passed to and fro between the two nightingales, drunk with their passion. Those who heard them listened in delight, and so similar were the two voices that they sounded like a single chant. Born of pain and longing, their song had the power to break the unhappiness of the world.

The wind went mute and the trees in the forest stood still. It was time for the last tale.

Your poetry--it doesn't deserve to be locked away, hidden from the rest of the world. And neither do you.

Tessa Emily Hall

Poetry is a never ending journey.

Albeit nurtured in democracy, And liking best that state republican Where every man is Kinglike and no manIs crowned above his fellows, yet I see,Spite of this modern fret for Liberty, Better the rule of One, whom all obey, Than to let clamorous demagogues betrayOur freedom with the kiss of anarchy.Wherefore I love them not whose hands profane Plant the red flag upon the piled-up street For no right cause, beneath whose ignorant reignArts, Culture, Reverence, Honor, all things fade, Save Treason and the dagger of her trade, Or Murder with his silent bloody fee.

The reason Milton wrote in fetters when he wrote of Angels & God, and at liberty when of Devils & Hell, is because he was a true Poet and of the Devil's party without knowing it.

Her love of words is a private passion - one she would rather not share. In the house of her childhood though everything had to be shared. If she tried to hold anything back, they would search and find the hidden places. Her written words, discovered, read were just the source of more pain and punishment. This was why she loved poetry. They did not always understand it so they left it alone.

Writing is my passion. Words are the way to know ecstasy. Without them life is barren. The poet insists, language is a body of suffering and when you take up language you take up the suffering too. All my life I have been suffering for words. Words have been the source of the pain and the way to heal. Struck as a child for talking, for speaking out of turn, for being out of my place. Struck as a grown woman for not knowing when to shut up, for not being willing to sacrifice words for desire. Struck by writing a book that disrupts. There are many ways to be hit. Pain is the price we pay to speak the truth.

In an instant he forgot Joe's poem about Japan except the part about 'you are the bell, and I am the tongue of the bell, ringing you,' and a new sound entered his life, like when he was a kid and he first heard the sound of horses clip-clopping and he asked his mother in wonder, "What's that sound, because I've never heard it before?

Melina Marchetta

Previous 1 … 12 13 14 15 16 … 121 Next