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Read through the most famous quotes by topic #poet
Fuck You Poem #45 Fuck you in slang and conventional English. Fuck you in lost and neglected lingoes. Fuck you hungry and sated; faded, pock marked, and defaced. Fuck you with orange rind, fennel and anchovy paste. Fuck you with rosemary and thyme, and fried green olives on the side. Fuck you humidly and icily. Fuck you farsightedly and blindly. Fuck you nude and draped in stolen finery. Fuck you while cells divide wildly and birds trill. Thank you for barring me from his bedside while he was ill. Fuck you puce and chartreuse. Fuck you postmodern and prehistoric. Fuck you under the influence of opiun, codeine, laudanum, and paregoric. Fuck every real and imagined country you fancied yourself princess of. Fuck you on feast days and fast days, below and above. Fuck you sleepless and shaking for nineteen nights running. Fuck you ugly and fuck you stunning. Fuck you shipwrecked on the barren island of your bed. Fuck you marching in lockstep in the ranks of the dead. Fuck you at low and high tide. And fuck you astride anyone who has the bad luck to fuck you, in dank hallways, bathrooms, or kitchens. Fuck you in gasps and whispered benedictions. And fuck these curses, however heartfelt and true, that bind me, till I forgive you, to you. ↗
To Have Without Holding: Learning to love differently is hard, love with the hands wide open, love with the doors banging on their hinges, the cupboard unlocked, the wind roaring and whimpering in the rooms rustling the sheets and snapping the blinds that thwack like rubber bands in an open palm. It hurts to love wide open stretching the muscles that feel as if they are made of wet plaster, then of blunt knives, then of sharp knives. It hurts to thwart the reflexes of grab, of clutch, to love and let go again and again. It pesters to remember the lover who is not in the bed, to hold back what is owed to the work that gutters like a candle in a cave without air, to love consciously, conscientiously, concretely, constructively. I can't do it, you say it's killing me, but you thrive, you glow on the street like a neon raspberry, You float and sail, a helium balloon bright bachelor's buttons blue and bobbing on the cold and hot winds of our breath, as we make and unmake in passionate diastole and systole the rhythm of our unbound bonding, to have and not to hold, to love with minimized malice, hunger and anger moment by moment balanced. ↗
To Your eyes a thousand years are like yesterday come and gone, no more than a watch in the night. You sweep men away like a dream, like grass which springs up in the morning. In the morning it springs up and flowers, by evening it withers and fades. So we are destroyed in Your anger, struck with terror in Your fury. Our guilt lies open before You; our secrets in the light of Your face. All our days pass away in Your anger. Our life is over like a sigh. Our span is seventy years or eighty for those who are strong. And most of these are emptiness and pain, they pass swiftly and we are gone. ↗
To fill the days up of his dateless year Flame from Queen Helen to Queen Guenevere? For first of all the sphery signs whereby Love severs light from darkness, and most high, In the white front of January there glows The rose-red sign of Helen like a rose: And gold-eyed as the shore-flower shelterless Whereon the sharp-breathed sea blows bitterness, A storm-star that the seafarers of love Strain their wind-wearied eyes for glimpses of, Shoots keen through February's grey frost and damp The lamplike star of Hero for a lamp; The star that Marlowe sang into our skies With mouth of gold, and morning in his eyes; And in clear March across the rough blue sea The signal sapphire of Alcyone Makes bright the blown bross of the wind-foot year; And shining like a sunbeam-smitten tear Full ere it fall, the fair next sign in sight Burns opal-wise with April-coloured light When air is quick with song and rain and flame, My birth-month star that in love's heaven hath name Iseult, a light of blossom and beam and shower, My singing sign that makes the song-tree flower; Next like a pale and burning pearl beyond The rose-white sphere of flower-named Rosamond Signs the sweet head of Maytime; and for June Flares like an angered and storm-reddening moon Her signal sphere, whose Carthaginian pyre Shadowed her traitor's flying sail with fire; Next, glittering as the wine-bright jacinth-stone, A star south-risen that first to music shone, The keen girl-star of golden Juliet bears Light northward to the month whose forehead wears Her name for flower upon it, and his trees Mix their deep English song with Veronese; And like an awful sovereign chrysolite Burning, the supreme fire that blinds the night, The hot gold head of Venus kissed by Mars, A sun-flower among small sphered flowers of stars, The light of Cleopatra fills and burns The hollow of heaven whence ardent August yearns; And fixed and shining as the sister-shed Sweet tears for Phaethon disorbed and dead, The pale bright autumn's amber-coloured sphere, That through September sees the saddening year As love sees change through sorrow, hath to name Francesca's; and the star that watches flame The embers of the harvest overgone Is Thisbe's, slain of love in Babylon, Set in the golden girdle of sweet signs A blood-bright ruby; last save one light shines An eastern wonder of sphery chrysopras, The star that made men mad, Angelica's; And latest named and lordliest, with a sound Of swords and harps in heaven that ring it round, Last love-light and last love-song of the year's, Gleams like a glorious emerald Guenevere's. ↗
The white woman across the aisle from me says 'Look, look at all the history, that house on the hill there is over two hundred years old, ' as she points out the window past me into what she has been taught. I have learned little more about American history during my few days back East than what I expected and far less of what we should all know of the tribal stories whose architecture is 15,000 years older than the corners of the house that sits museumed on the hill. 'Walden Pond, ' the woman on the train asks, 'Did you see Walden Pond? ' and I don't have a cruel enough heart to break her own by telling her there are five Walden Ponds on my little reservation out West and at least a hundred more surrounding Spokane, the city I pretended to call my home. 'Listen, ' I could have told her. 'I don't give a shit about Walden. I know the Indians were living stories around that pond before Walden's grandparents were born and before his grandparents' grandparents were born. I'm tired of hearing about Don-fucking-Henley saving it, too, because that's redundant. If Don Henley's brothers and sisters and mothers and father hadn't come here in the first place then nothing would need to be saved.' But I didn't say a word to the woman about Walden Pond because she smiled so much and seemed delighted that I thought to bring her an orange juice back from the food car. I respect elders of every color. All I really did was eat my tasteless sandwich, drink my Diet Pepsi and nod my head whenever the woman pointed out another little piece of her country's history while I, as all Indians have done since this war began, made plans for what I would do and say the next time somebody from the enemy thought I was one of their own. ↗
Go into yourself. Find out the reason that commands you to write; see whether it has spread its roots into the very depths of your heart; confess to yourself whether you would have to die if you were forbidden to write. This most of all: ask yourself in the most silent hour of your night: must I write? Dig into yourself for a deep answer. And if this answer rings out in assent, if you meet this solemn question with a strong, simple “I must,” then build your life in accordance with this necessity; your whole life, even into its humblest and most indifferent hour, must become a sign and witness to this impulse. Then come close to Nature. Then, as if no one had ever tried before, try to say what you see and feel and love and lose... ...Describe your sorrows and desires, the thoughts that pass through your mind and your belief in some kind of beauty - describe all these with heartfelt, silent, humble sincerity and, when you express yourself, use the Things around you, the images from your dreams, and the objects that you remember. If your everyday life seems poor, don’t blame it; blame yourself; admit to yourself that you are not enough of a poet to call forth its riches; because for the creator there is not poverty and no poor, indifferent place. And even if you found yourself in some prison, whose walls let in none of the world’s sounds – wouldn’t you still have your childhood, that jewel beyond all price, that treasure house of memories? Turn your attentions to it. Try to raise up the sunken feelings of this enormous past; your personality will grow stronger, your solitude will expand and become a place where you can live in the twilight, where the noise of other people passes by, far in the distance. - And if out of this turning-within, out of this immersion in your own world, poems come, then you will not think of asking anyone whether they are good or not. Nor will you try to interest magazines in these works: for you will see them as your dear natural possession, a piece of your life, a voice from it. A work of art is good if it has arisen out of necessity. That is the only way one can judge it. ↗
I'm going to do something bigger and better, bigger and better and bolder, but first, I'm going to do something smaller and worse. ↗
