All Quotes By Tag: Poetry

“Promise me no promises, So will I not promise you: Keep we both our liberties, Never false and never true: Let us hold the die uncast, Free to come as free to go: For I cannot know your past, And of mine what can you know?”

“Put your mouthful of words away and come with me to watch the lilies open in such a field, growing there like yachts, slowly steering their petals without nurses or clocks.”

“I like for you to be still: it is as though you are absentdistant and full of sorrow as though you had diedOne word then, one smile is enoughAnd I’m happy; happy that it’s not true”

“Love’s language starts, stops, starts; the right words flowing or clotting in the heart.”

“Stasis in darkness.Then the substanceless blue”

“Sweet day, so cool, so calm, so bright,The bridal of the earth and sky;The dew shall weep thy fall tonight,For thou must die.”

“I hear they make greeting cards now to thank your therapist… for NOTHING”

“He [the poet] brings out the inner part of things and presents them to men in such a way that they cannot refuse but must accept it. But how the mere choice and rhythm of words should produce so magical an effect no one has yet been able to comprehend, and least of all the poets themselves.”

“O I never thought that joys would run away from boys,Or that boys would change their minds and forsake such summer joys;But alack I never dreamed that the world had other toys”

“Sometimes in composition class, when I have been confronted by someone who simply cannot get the first word written on paper, I give the following advice: Say your essay into a tape recorder and then write it down.”

“Be a poet in action as well as in words.”

“Porque a volar no se aprende solo, pero a caer no se aprende nunca.”

“Only In SleepOnly in sleep I see their faces,Children I played with when I was a child,Louise comes back with her brown hair braided,Annie with ringlets warm and wild.Only in sleep Time is forgotten –What may have come to them, who can know?Yet we played last night as long ago,And the doll-house stood at the turn of the stair.The years had not sharpened their smooth round faces,I met their eyes and found them mild –Do they, too, dream of me, I wonder,And for them am I too a child?”

“Then there’s the twoof us. This wordis far too short for us, it has onlyfour letters, too sparseto fill those deep barevacuums between the starsthat press on us with their deafness.It’s not love we don’t wishto fall into, but that fear.This word is not enough but it willhave to do. It’s a singlevowel in this metallicsilence, a mouth that saysO again and again in wonderand pain, a breath, a fingergrip on a cliffside. You canhold on or let go.”

“The MercyThe ship that took my mother to Ellis Islandeighty-three years ago was named “The Mercy.”She remembers trying to eat a bananawithout first peeling it and seeing her first orangein the hands of a young Scot, a seamanwho gave her a bite and wiped her mouth for herwith a red bandana and taught her the word,”orange,” saying it patiently over and over.A long autumn voyage, the days darkeningwith the black waters calming as night came on,then nothing as far as her eyes could see and spacewithout limit rushing off to the cornersof creation. She prayed in Russian and Yiddishto find her family in New York, prayersunheard or misunderstood or perhaps ignoredby all the powers that swept the waves of darknessbefore she woke, that kept “The Mercy” afloatwhile smallpox raged among the passengersand crew until the dead were buried at seawith strange prayers in a tongue she could not fathom.”The Mercy,” I read on the yellowing pages of a bookI located in a windowless room of the libraryon 42nd Street, sat thirty-one daysoffshore in quarantine before the passengersdisembarked. There a story ends. Other shipsarrived, “Tancred” out of Glasgow, “The Neptune”registered as Danish, “Umberto IV,”the list goes on for pages, November givesway to winter, the sea pounds this alien shore.Italian miners from Piemonte digunder towns in western Pennsylvaniaonly to rediscover the same nightmarethey left at home. A nine-year-old girl travelsall night by train with one suitcase and an orange.She learns that mercy is something you can eatagain and again while the juice spills overyour chin, you can wipe it away with the backof your hands and you can never get enough.”