#poet

Most people become bankrupt through having invested too heavily in the prose of life. To have ruined one's self over poetry is an honour. ↗

— Oscar Wilde

#poetry #prose #life

Meridian First daylight on the bittersweet-hung sleeping porch at high summer; dew all over the lawn, sowing diamond- point-highlighted shadows; the hired man's shadow revolving along the walk, a flash of milkpails passing; no threat in sight, no hint anywhere in the universe, of that apathy at the meridian, the noon of absolute boredom; flies crooning black lullabies in the kitchen, milk-soured crocks, cream separator still unwashed; what is there to life but chores and more chores, dishwater, fatigue, unwanted children; nothing to stir the longueur of afternoon except possibly thunderheads; climbing, livid, turreted alabaster lit up from within by splendor and terror -- forded lightening's split-second disaster. ↗

— Amy Clampitt

#life

Sometimes it’s great, and sometimes it’s shit. These are the things all the great philosophers just won’t tell you flat out about life. You keep moving, keep living, keep breathing And you keep writing-creating because that’s what you do And that’s who you are. There are no magical voices to guide You except your own. Make it count. ~ R.M. ENGELHARDT ↗

— R.M. Engelhardt

#poet #poetry #quotes-on-life #quotes-on-writing #r-m-engelhardt

Unless you are silent, you will not know your urgent heart, how it beats between the thin skin of yes and no. ↗

— Drew Myron

#poetry-love-spirituality #poetry-quotes-life #reflection #thoughtful #life

But to cast my life away just like that for nothing at all -- that I won’t do. ↗

— Jaroslav Seifert

#poetry #life

We the mortals touch the metals, the wind, the ocean shores, the stones, knowing they will go on, inert or burning, and I was discovering, naming all the these things: it was my destiny to love and say goodbye. ↗

— Pablo Neruda

#poetry #love

Stephen kissed me in the spring, Robin in the fall, But Colin only looked at me And never kissed at all. Stephen’s kiss was lost in jest, Robin’s lost in play, But the kiss in Colin’s eyes Haunts me night and day. ↗

— Sara Teasdale

#love #memories #poetry #love

What lips my lips have kissed, and where, and why, I have forgotten, and what arms have lain Under my head till morning, but the rain Is full of ghosts tonight, that tap and sigh Upon the glass and listen for reply, And in my heart there stirs a quiet pain For unremembered lads that not again Will turn to me at midnight with a cry. Thus in the winter stands the lonely tree, Nor knows what birds have vanished one by one, Yet knows its boughs more silent than before: I cannot say what loves have come and gone, I only know that summer sang in me A little while, that in me sings no more. ↗

— Edna St. Vincent Millay

#poetry #love

And would it have been worth it, after all, Would it have been worth while, After the sunsets and the dooryards and the sprinkled streets, After the novels, after the teacups, after the skirts that trail along the floor - And this, and so much more? - ↗

— T.S. Eliot

#prufrock #love

In Blackwater Woods Look, the trees are turning their own bodies into pillars of light, are giving off the rich fragrance of cinnamon and fulfillment, the long tapers of cattails are bursting and floating away over the blue shoulders of the ponds, and every pond, no matter what its name is, is nameless now. Every year everything I have ever learned in my lifetime leads back to this: the fires and the black river of loss whose other side is salvation, whose meaning none of us will ever know. To live in this world you must be able to do three things: to love what is mortal; to hold it against your bones knowing your own life depends on it; and, when the time comes to let it go, to let it go. ↗

— Mary Oliver

#poetry #life