Poetry Quotes - Page 17

I had let it all grow. I had supposed It was all OK. Your lifeWas a liner I voyaged in.Costly education had fitted you out.Financiers and committees and consultantsEffaced themselves in the gleam of your finish.You trembled with the new life of those engines.That first morning,Before your first class at College, you sat thereSipping coffee. Now I know, as I did not,What eyes waited at the back of the classTo check your first professional performanceAgainst their expectations. What assessorsWaited to see you justify the costAnd redeem their gamble. What a furnaceOf eyes waited to prove your metal. I watchedThe strange dummy stiffness, the misery,Of your blue flannel suit, its straitjacket, uglyHalf-approximation to your ideaOf the properties you hoped to ease into,And your horror in it. And the tannedAlmost green undertinge of your faceShrunk to its wick, your scar lumpish, your plaitedHead pathetically tiny.You waited,Knowing yourself helpless in the tweezersOf the life that judges you, and I sawThe flayed nerve, the unhealable face-woundWhich was all you had for courage.I saw that what you gripped, as you sipped,Were terrors that killed you once already.Now I see, I saw, sitting, the lonelyGirl who was going to die.That blue suit.A mad, execution uniform,Survived your sentence. But then I sat, stilled,Unable to fathom what stilled youAs I looked at you, as I am stilledPermanently now, permanentlyBending so briefly at your open coffin.

... paint in blue and black...sometimes gray - the colors of night - occasionally I surprise you with a mustard yellow, but then, I am a poet ...

...careful the morning lest it wake from slumber the city half-encumbered by the morning mist ...

I have a Gumbie Cat in mind, her name is Jennyanydots;Her coat is one of the tabby kind,with tiger stripes and lepard spots.

T.S Eliot

i was really into communal living and we were all /such free spirits, crossing the country we were /nomads and artists and no one ever stopped / to think about how the one working class housemate / was whoring to support a gang of upper middle class / deadheads with trust fund safety nets and connecticut / childhoods, everyone was too busy processing their isms / to deal with non-issues like class....and it’s just so cool / how none of them have hang-ups about / sex work they’re all real / open-minded real / revolutionary you know / the legal definition of pimp is / one who lives off the earnings of / a prostitute, one or five or / eight and i’d love to stay and / eat some of the stir fry i’ve been cooking / for y’all but i’ve got to go fuck / this guy so we can all get stoned and / go for smoothies tomorrow, save me / some rice, ok?

A language is a map of our failures

I strike the ground with the soles of my feet and life rises up my legs, spreads up my skeleton, takes possession of me, drives away distress and sweetens my memory. The world trembles.

life is first boredom, then fear.whether or not we use it, it goes,and leaves what something hidden from us chose,and age, and then the only end of age.

Love crosses the sky \ on a peculiar disturbing night.

Shannon A. Thompson

sometimes I hearscreaming like a childand wake upto find it’s me

Stephen Fitzsimons

I don't know if I have ever truly believed that everyone deserves love. But if I had to take it one moment further into those shadowed valleys of heartfull, I would admit that I do believe that love, deserves everyone.

Mikl Paul

Like the number nineeternity is forever mine

Kenneth G. Ortiz

there are these places on your poem, / where I want to write bodies.

Mikl Paul

Our age has built itself vast reservoirs of power / formless as the straining energy that it wrests from the earth.

Rainer Maria Rilke

and you taste / of the memory of god abandoned.

Mikl Paul

The untented Kosmos my abode,I pass, a wilful stranger:My mistress still the open roadAnd the bright eyes of danger.

R.L.S.

The city they are building asks you to stay; remind yourself what is worth keeping, while the lighthouse of your moan warns the ship of your heart that he is a stone.

Mikl Paul

I want to gossip about forever / against the part of your back that / is mine.

Mikl Paul

Please let me know if I am not hereLet me know if I fail to find you thereFor before the dawn I leave the night behind meAnd before my heart I let you leave me behind.

I negate this distance with / what it would be / to be shining you.

Mikl Paul

Write to me your most perfect epitaph, or I shall compare a poet to a lecturer. Thou art more Spartan than a ballad monger who makes his living as a Wal-Mart greeter;

Scott Jonathan Nixon

poems are small moments of enlightenment

Natalie Goldberg

No one understands now. Those who couldhear a song this deeply vanished long ago.

Li Bai

Wisdomis in the insane asylums.The endis in the everyday-pale smiles

Writing and art are my lovers

My grandmotherhad no time for old,no matter how her face crinkledor her days folded like an apron aroundher middle.

April Michelle Bratten

Doubt makes faith true

When I/Don’t know/What to say,/Let me/Listen.

John Northcutt Young

My fist is her flag still furled. Take the cannoli and leave the tuxedo - This is my jackleg opera to the world.

B.J. Ward

Early mapmakers kept their backs to the sea

Why are you so hard on yourself?I love you just the way you are,with your withered coat and wet scarf dangling like a spotless chandelier.The snow banks in Montreal are high, but I can see your trace, and silent grace and tin cup through the paned window.The precipitation melts your face, distorting your expression through the aged glass; broken, when I threw ancient stones to get your attentionas a child.I wanted a friend. The honest kind.

V.S.Atbay

I want to ripoff your logic and make passionate sense to you.

Jeffery McDaniel

We arrived and the miracle happened.It was the sea and the wind in the bells.We came from far, from years Thirsty as dust, from humble fishermen’s nets on barren shore."~ José Manuel Cardona, from Poems to Circe, The Birnam Wood (El Bosque de Birnam, Consell Insular D'Eivissa, 2007).Translated from the Spanish by Helene Cardona.

José Manuel Cardona

Because Of You, My Heart Exploded Into Stars

Tirumalai S. Srivatsan

The poet is a light and winged and holy thing, and there is no invention in him until he has been inspired and is out of his sneses, and the mind is no longer in him.

Plato

Healthy ChoicesHold stillKeep quiet.Get a degree to learn how to talksaying nothing.Catch a good manby being demure.the one your mother chooses.Let him climb youwhenever his urge,amidst headachesand menstrual achesand screaming infants.And when he bidsquick, turn over.Hold still.Make your tonguea slab of cementa white stone etchedwith your name.Kill your stories with knivesand knitting needlesand Clorox bleach.Hide in your mysteriousnessby saying nothing.Starch your thoughtswith ironed shirts.Tie your angerwith a knot inyour throatand when he comeswithout concernswallow it.Hold still.Keep desirehopeless as iceand sleepless nightsand painful as pinched eyelid.Keep your fingersfrom the razor,keep your longingto severhis condescensionsafely in your douchbag.Turn the bladeagainst yourself.Don't twitchas your slashed wristsstain your bathroom tiles.Disinfect with Pine Sol.Hold still. Keep quiet.Keep tight your lips,keep dead your dreams,keep cold your heart.Keep quiet.And he will shoutpraisesto yourperfection.

Janice Mirikitani

Forgive me,joy,if I blasphemed youbefore I learned to love.

And like nectar inside the bud,my blood drinks from your blood, beloved,and starves to join the salvation in your eyes;to be understood again and again, by your nakedness and certainty, a humbleness that trickles into the crevices of my seasoned mind.

V.S.Atbay

There always comes the day when children swallowthe key to the door of secrecy. They’ll not return it.

Emerging from chaos, came Light, filling need.

E'yen A. Gardner

I drank the dregs of the wine to what remained of my health.I gave the last of my fervor for what remained of my hope.I cannot say for sure that this country is cursed,Honey flows with the milk, and the milk might curdle. Eli7

Elizaveta Mikhailichenko

i see poets riding the red winds unchecked by the borders of time, wandering with light feet over the land mines and trip wires, barbed and barbarian, unfettered through the barriers that curtail the flows of life, poets pelting the halting barriers which strangle everyone everywhere.

Peter Standish Evans

Imagine a sunset, lavender and red / as battered morals . . .

I feel like shredded paper thrown to the wind, each poet took a piece of me and wrote a word or phrase...

Doutor Luis Alexandre Ribeiro Branco

I’m on a long journey around and through myself...

Doutor Luis Alexandre Ribeiro Branco

A badly written novel can always be shortened to a poem.

Gloria D. Gonsalves

I was overcome by the simplicity of the brook and abandoned my envy and desire for bravery, and simply prayed: “Lord, give me the quietness of the waters of this little brook and like it I will amalgamate myself in thee!

Doutor Luis Alexandre Ribeiro Branco

The important thing in life is to be.

Doutor Luis Alexandre Ribeiro Branco

Touch Me, but not with your hands.

Orville Lloyd Douglas

Find that gem amongst your so-called, "friends.

But you must know that only he who fights the darkness within will the day after tomorrow have his own share in the sun.

Odysseus Elytis

You did anything to bury me, but you forgot that I was a seed.

Dinos Christianopoulos

To walk quietly until the miracle in everything speaks is poetry, whether we write it down or not.

Mark Nepo

Her smile was like laughter to me— it bubbled in like champagne.

Atticus

If there is no God,Not everything is permitted to man.He is still his brother's keeperAnd he is not permitted to sadden his brother,By saying there is no God.

Czesław Miłosz

I was born with my eyes turned inward.

David Joseph Cribbin

and everybody was happy that uncle lee was able to get that scholarship even though you wondered when you could do quadratic equations in your head why you had a basketball scholarship but you always knew that you had to take what they were giving since that was all you were going to get but you never fooled yourself about either the taking or the giving or the needing or the having you just sort of said to yourself I'll have to see what is being offered

I am telling himwhat he wants to hear: antsdying of love underthe constellation of the dandelion.I swear that a white rose,sprinkled with wine, sings.I am laughing, tiltingmy head carefullyas if checking an invention.I am dancing, dancingin astonished skin, inan embrace that creates me.

Wisława Szymborska

I was asked once why I write poetry. I said, why do you breath?

Shannon Lynette

The trip to Mars can only be understood through Black Americans. I say, the trip to Mars can only be understood through Black Americans.

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