All Quotes By Tag: Poetry

“Making a FistFor the first time, on the road north of Tampico,I felt the life sliding out of me,a drum in the desert, harder and harder to hear.I was seven, I lay in the carwatching palm trees swirl a sickening pattern past the glass.My stomach was a melon split wide inside my skin.”How do you know if you are going to die?”I begged my mother.We had been traveling for days.With strange confidence she answered,”When you can no longer make a fist.”Years later I smile to think of that journey,the borders we must cross separately,stamped with our unanswerable woes.I who did not die, who am still living,still lying in the backseat behind all my questions,clenching and opening one small hand.”

“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.”

“Gains for all our lossesThere are gains for all our lossesThere are balms for all our painsBut when youth the dream departsIt takes some thing from our heartsAnd never comes againWe are stronger and are betterUnder manhood’s sterner reignStill we feel that some thing sweet Followed youth with flying feetAnd will never come again.Some thing beautiful has vanishedAnd we sigh for it in vainWe behold it every where—-On the earth and in the air—-But it never comes again.”

“I see your picture and in that picture I didn’t see you.”

“I thought my fireplace dead and stirred the ashes. I burned my fingers.”

“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.”

“Who could have foretoldthe heart grows oldfrom touching others”

“And, even yet, I dare not let it languish,Dare not indulge in memory’s rapturous pain;Once drinking deep of that divinest anguish,How could I seek the empty world again?”

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

“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.”

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

“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.”

“Twas the night before Thanksgiving. All the food’s in the oven. And I’m in the bedroom performin’ self lovin’.”

“I’m not a woman you bring home to Mother, pick out china patterns with, or Mary forefend, breed. I’ve seen a chunk of the universe, true, but there’s still so much more to see. I doubt I’ll ever cure this wanderlust, and I’m content with dedicating my life to failing to sate it… He’s never going to sit at my feet and write me poems, which is good because I hate poetry, except dirty ones that rhyme.”

“Ya no la quiero, es cierto, pero tal vez la quiero.Es tan corto el amor, y es tan largo el olvido.”