Poetry Quotes - Page 98

Living together/ is one move closer/ to living apart

No one wants to read poetry. You have to make it impossible for them to put the poem down--impossible for them to stop reading it, word after word. You have to keep them from closing the book.

Muriel Rukeyser

My brain hums with scraps of poetry and madness.

Virginia Woolf

To the Virgins, To Make much of TimeGather ye rose-buds while ye may,Old Time is still a-flying;And this same flower that smiles today,tTomorrow will be dying.The glorious lamp of heaven, the sun,tThe higher he’s a-getting,The sooner will his race be run,tAnd nearer he is to setting.That age is best which is the first,tWhen youth and blood are warmer;But being spent, the worse, and worsttTimes still succeed the former.Then be not coy, but use your time,tAnd while you may, go marry;For having lost but once your prime,tYou may for ever tarry.

Robert Herrick

Wild Nights – Wild Nights!Were I with theeWild Nights should beOur luxury!Futile – the winds –To a heart in port –Done with the compass –Done with the chart!Rowing in Eden –Ah, the sea!Might I moor – Tonight –In thee!

Emily Dickinson

Sometimes I dreamthat everything in the world is here, in my room, in a great closet, named and orderly,and I am here too, in front of it, hardly able to see for the flash and the brightness—and sometimes I am that madcap person clapping my hands and singing; and sometimes I am that quiet person down on my knees.

Mary Oliver

The stars are forth, the moon above the topsOf the snow-shining mountains.—Beautiful!I linger yet with Nature, for the nightHath been to me a more familiar faceThan that of man; and in her starry shadeOf dim and solitary loveliness,I learn'd the language of another world.

George Gordon Byron

You are an Universe of Universes and your soul a source of songs.

Rubén Darío

We suffer each other to have each other a while.

Li-Young Lee

You gave me hyacinths first a year ago;tThey called me the hyacinth girl.'t —Yet when we came back, late, from the Hyacinth garden,t Your arms full, and your hair wet, I could nott Speak, and my eyes failed, I was neithert Living nor dead, and I knew nothing,t Looking into the heart of light, the silence.t Od' und leer das Meer.

T.S Eliot

Gather the stars if you wish it soGather the songs and keep them.Gather the faces of women.Gather for keeping years and years.And then...Loosen your hands, let go and say good-bye.Let the stars and songs go.Let the faces and years go.Loosen your hands and say good-bye.

Carl Sandburg

In Xanadu did Kubla KhanA stately pleasure-dome decree:Where Alph, the sacred river, ranThrough caverns measureless to man Down to a sunless sea.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

I'll say I love you,Which will lead, of course,to disappointment,but those words unsaidpoison every next moment.I will try to disappoint youbetter than anyone else has.

Stephen Dunn

What would the world be, once bereft Of wet and of wildness? Let them be left, O let them be left, wildness and wet; Long live the weeds and the wilderness yet.

Gerard Manley Hopkins

I used to think love was two people suckingon the same straw to see whose thirst was stronger,but then I whiffed the crushed walnuts of your nape,traced jackals in the snow-covered tombstones of your teeth.I used to think love was a non-stop saxophone soloin the lungs, till I hung with you like a pair of sneakersfrom a phone line, and you promised to always smellthe rose in my kerosene. I used to think love was terminalpelvic ballet, till you let me jog beside while you pedaledall over hell on the menstrual bicycle, your tongueripping through my prairie like a tornado of paper cuts.I used to think love was an old man smashing a mirrorover his knee, till you helped me carry the barbellof my spirit back up the stairs after my car pirouettedin the desert. You are my history book. I used to not believein fairy tales till I played the dunce in sheep’s clothingand felt how perfectly your foot fit in the glass slipperof my ass. But then duty wrapped its phone cordaround my ankle and yanked me across the continent.And now there are three thousand miles between the uand s in esophagus. And being without you is like standingat a cement-filled wall with a roll of Yugoslavian nickelsand making a wish. Some days I miss you so muchI’d jump off the roof of your office buildingjust to catch a glimpse of you on the way down. I wishwe could trade left eyeballs, so we could always seewhat the other sees. But you’re here, I’m there,and we have only words, a nightly phone call - one chanceto mix feelings into syllables and pour into the receiver,hope they don’t disassemble in that calculus of wire.And lately - with this whole war thing - the language machinesupporting it - I feel betrayed by the alphabet, like they’reinjecting strychnine into my vowels, infecting my consonants,naming attack helicopters after shattered Indian tribes:Apache, Blackhawk; and West Bank colonizers are settlers,so Sharon is Davey Crockett, and Arafat: Geronimo,and it’s the Wild West all over again. And I imagine Picassolooking in a mirror, decorating his face in war paint,washing his brushes in venom. And I think of Jeninin all that rubble, and I feel like a Cyclops with two eyes,like an anorexic with three mouths, like a scuba diverin quicksand, like a shark with plastic vampire teeth,like I’m the executioner’s fingernail trying to reasonwith the hand. And I don’t know how to speak lovewhen the heart is a busted cup filling with spit and paste,and the only sexual fantasy I have is bustinginto the Pentagon with a bazooka-sized pen and blowingopen the minds of generals. And I comfort myselfwith the thought that we’ll name our first child Jenin,and her middle name will be Terezin, and we’ll teach herhow to glow in the dark, and how to swallow firecrackers,and to never neglect the first straw; because no oneever talks about the first straw, it’s always the last strawthat gets all the attention, but by then it’s way too late.

Jeffrey McDaniel

Poetry is life distilled.

Gwendolyn Brooks

There is another world, and it is in this one.

Paul Éluard

The aching in my chest isn't because I miss you,it's realizing that you have become someone I no longer know,your fears, your 4 am thoughts, your achievements,are things I no longer have an equivalent to.Who we were and who we are are four different people, and the me from now doesn't relate to the me from then, let alone to the you from now.-Tanzy Sayadi and Jarod Kintz

Tanzy Sayadi

There is no Space or TimeOnly intensity, And tame thingsHave no immensity

Mina Loy

I love you. I love you, but I’m turning to my versesand my heart is closinglike a fist.

Frank O'Hara

the worstthing that ever happenedtothe worldwasthe white man coming across gun powder.–– the end of the world | the beginning of white supremacy

Nayyirah Waheed

I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow. I feel my fate in what I cannot fear. I learn by going where I have to go.

Theodore Roethke

If you cannot be a poet, be the poem.

David Carradine

Some men are born sodomites, some achieve sodomy, and some have sodomy thrust upon them...

Aleister Crowley

The season was waning fastOur nights were growing cold at lastI took her to bed with silk and song,'Lay still, my love, I won’t be long;I must prepare my body for passion.''O, your body you give, but all else you ration.''It is because of these dreams of a sylvan scene:A bleeding nymph to leave me serene...I have dreams of a trembling wench.''You have dreams,' she said, 'that cannot be quenched.''Our passion,' said I, 'should never be feared;As our longing for love can never be cured.Our want is our way and our way is our will,We have the love, my love, that no one can kill.''If night is your love, then in dreams you’ll fulfill...This love, our love, that no one can kill.'Yet want is my way, and my way is my will,Thus I killed my love with a sleeping pill.

Roman Payne

Under the greenwood tree,Who loves to lie with meAnd tune his merry note,Unto the sweet bird's throat;Come hither, come hither, come hither.Here shall he seeNo enemyBut winter and rough weather.

William Shakespeare

You may write me down in historyWith your bitter, twisted lies,You may tread me in the very dirtBut still, like dust, I'll rise.Does my sassiness upset you? Why are you beset with gloom? 'Cause I walk like I've got oil wellsPumping in my living room.Just like moons and like suns,With the certainty of tides,Just like hopes springing high,Still I'll rise.Did you want to see me broken? Bowed head and lowered eyes? Shoulders falling down like teardrops.Weakened by my soulful cries.Does my haughtiness offend you? Don't you take it awful hard'Cause I laugh like I've got gold minesDiggin' in my own back yard.You may shoot me with your words,You may cut me with your eyes,You may kill me with your hatefulness,But still, like air, I'll rise.Does my sexiness upset you? Does it come as a surpriseThat I dance like I've got diamondsAt the meeting of my thighs? Out of the huts of history's shameI riseUp from a past that's rooted in painI riseI'm a black ocean, leaping and wide,Welling and swelling I bear in the tide.Leaving behind nights of terror and fearI riseInto a daybreak that's wondrously clearI riseBringing the gifts that my ancestors gave,I am the dream and the hope of the slave.I riseI riseI rise.

Maya Angelou

I love you as the plant that never blooms but carries in itself the light of hidden flowers; thanks to your love a certain solid fragrence risen from the earth, lives darkly in my body. and: No one can stop the river of your hands, your eyes and their sleepiness, my dearest. You are the trembling of time, which passes between the vertical light and the darkening sky. and: From the stormy archipelagoes I brought my windy accordian, waves of crazy rain, the habitual slowness of natural things: they made up my wild heart.

Pablo Neruda

Listen! If stars are litIt means there is someone who needs it,It means someone wants them to be,That someone deems those specks of spitMagnificent!

Vladimir Mayakovsky

I would not come in.I meant not even if asked,And I hadn't been.

Robert Frost

To see a World in a grain of sand,And a Heaven in a wild flower,Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand,And Eternity in an hour.

William Blake

I grew up in this town, my poetry was born between the hill and the river, it took its voice from the rain, and like the timber, it steeped itself in the forests.

Pablo Neruda

I will come back to you, I swear I will;And you will know me still.I shall be only a little tallerThan when I went.

Edna St. Vincent Millay

Look in my face; my name is Might-have-been; I am also call'd No-more, Too-late, Farewell

Dante Gabriel Rossetti

I am tired, Beloved, of chafing my heart againstThe want of you;Of squeezing it into little inkdrops,And posting it.

Amy Lowell

That’s what I do: I make coffee and occasionally succumb to suicidal nihilism. But you shouldn’t worry — poetry is still first. Cigarettes and alcohol follow

Anne Sexton

The lamb misused breeds public strifeAnd yet forgives the butcher's knife.

William Blake

It costs me never a stab nor squirm / To tread by chance upon a worm. / Aha, my little dear, / I say, Your clan will pay me back one day.

Dorothy Parker

Resolve, and thou art free.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

The courage of the poet is to keep ajar the door that leads into madness.

Christopher Morley

We have seen the best minds of our generation destroyed by boredom at poetry readings.

Lawrence Ferlinghetti

Valentine's Day is the poet's holiday.

Ted Kooser

Anger's like a battery that leaks acid right out of meAnd it starts from the heart 'til it reaches my outer me

Criss Jami

If it ain't a pleasure, it ain't a poem.

William Carlos Williams

Want of imagination makes things unreal enough to be destroyed. By imagination I mean knowledge and love. I mean compassion. People of power kill children, the old send the young to die, because they have no imagination. They have power. Can you have power and imagination at the same time? Can you kill people you don’t know and have compassion for them at the same time?

Wendell Berry

forsan et haec olim meminisse iuvabit.and perhaps it will be pleasing to have remembered these things one day

Virgil

The History TeacherTrying to protect his students' innocencehe told them the Ice Age was really justthe Chilly Age, a period of a million yearswhen everyone had to wear sweaters.And the Stone Age became the Gravel Age,named after the long driveways of the time.The Spanish Inquisition was nothing morethan an outbreak of questions such as"How far is it from here to Madrid?""What do you call the matador's hat?"The War of the Roses took place in a garden,and the Enola Gay dropped one tiny atom on Japan.The children would leave his classroomfor the playground to torment the weakand the smart,mussing up their hair and breaking their glasses,while he gathered up his notes and walked homepast flower beds and white picket fences,wondering if they would believe that soldiersin the Boer War told long, rambling storiesdesigned to make the enemy nod off.

Billy Collins

Since then, at an uncertain hour, That agony returns: And till my ghastly tale is told, This heart within me burns.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

But often, in the world’s most crowded streets,But often, in the din of strife,There rises an unspeakable desireAfter the knowledge of our buried life;A thirst to spend our fire and restless forceIn tracking out our true, original course;A longing to inquireInto the mystery of this heart which beatsSo wild, so deep in us—to knowWhence our lives come and where they go.

Matthew Arnold

tell meof something fiercer than the love with which i gaze upon youof something softer than the tendernesswith which i hold you.

Sanober Khan

I shall have peace, as leafy trees are peaceful When rain bends down the bough; And I shall be more silent and cold-hearted Than you are now.

Sara Teasdale

I felt a Cleaving in my Mind—As if my Brain had split—I tried to match it—Seam by Seam—But could not make it fit.

Emily Dickinson

Jack Prelutsky

Love me like a wrong turn on a bad roadlate at night.

Kim Addonizio

Lord, may the pain be ours, And the weakness that it brings, But at least give us the strength, Of not showing it to anyone!

Fernando Pessoa

I could feel the day offering itself to me,and I wanted nothing morethan to be in the moment-but which moment?Not that one, or that one, or that one,

Billy Collins

The young student sits with his head bent over his books, and his mind straying in youth's dreamland; where prose is prowling on the desk and poetry hiding in the heart.

Rabindranath Tagore

Haiku is not a shriek, a howl, a sigh, or a yawn; rather, it is the deep breath of life.

Santōka Taneda

When you were sleeping on the sofaI put my ear to your ear and listenedto the echo of your dreams.That is the ocean I want to dive in, merge with the bright fish, plankton and pirate ships.I walk up to people on the street that kind of look like youand ask them the questions I would ask you.Can we sit on a rooftop and watch stars dissolve into smokerising from a chimney? Can I swing like Tarzan in the jungle of your breathing? I don’t wish I was in your arms, I just wish I was peddling a bicycle toward your arms.

Jeffrey McDaniel

HEARTWORKEach day is born with a sunriseand ends in a sunset, the same way weopen our eyes to see the light, and close them to hear the dark.You have no control overhow your story begins or ends.But by now, you should know thatall things have an ending.Every spark returns to darkness.Every sound returns to silence.And every flower returns to sleepwith the earth.The journey of the sunand moon is predictable.But yours, is your ultimateART.

Suzy Kassem

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Poetry Quotes - Page 98

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