#poetry

Conscience is no more than the dead speaking to us. ↗

— Jim Carroll

#conscience #death #ghosts #poetry #death

If after I die, people want to write my biography, there is nothing simpler. They only need two dates: the date of my birth and the date of my death. Between one and another, every day is mine. ↗

— Fernando Pessoa

#death #intimacy #life #poetry #privacy

Before she knew it, she was just another set of eyes in a dusty attic, waiting for the stairs to creak. ↗

— Kelly Moran

#death #ghosts #poetry-quotes #death

On Living Living is no laughing matter: You must take it seriously. So much so and to such a degree that, for example, your hands tied behind your back, your back to the wall or else in a laboratory in your white coat and safety glasses, you can die for people – even for people whose faces you’ve never seen, even though you know living is the most real, most beautiful thing. I mean, you must take living so seriously that even at seventy, for example, you’ll plant olive trees – and not for your children, either, but because, although you fear death you don’t believe it, because living, I mean, weighs heavier. ↗

— Nâzım Hikmet

#poetry #beauty

I went down not long ago to the Mad River, under the willows I knelt and drank from that crumpled flow, call it what madness you will, there's a sickness worse than the risk of death and that's forgetting what we should never forget. Tecumseh lived here. The wounds of the past are ignored, but hang on like the litter that snags among the yellow branches, newspapers and plastic bags, after the rains. Where are the Shawnee now? Do you know? Or would you have to write to Washington, and even then, whatever they said, would you believe it? Sometimes I would like to paint my body red and go into the glittering snow to die. His name meant Shooting Star. From Mad River country north to the border he gathered the tribes and armed them one more time. He vowed to keep Ohio and it took him over twenty years to fail. After the bloody and final fighting, at Thames, it was over, except his body could not be found, and you can do whatever you want with that, say his people came in the black leaves of the night and hauled him to a secret grave, or that he turned into a little boy again, and leaped into a birch canoe and went rowing home down the rivers. Anyway this much I'm sure of: if we meet him, we'll know it, he will still be so angry. ↗

— Mary Oliver

#poetry #tecumseh #death

some men never die and some men never live but we're all alive tonight. ↗

— Charles Bukowski

#life #poetry #death

When the star dies, Its eye closes; tired of watching, It flies back to its first bright dream. ↗

— Dejan Stojanovic

#circling #death #dejan-stojanovic #dreams #eye

If I could find one word that would shudder the air like that frightened sob, that wordless prayer of my newly-born, who drew one breath, and with unopened eyes sank back into death; If I could break the world's cold heart with that cry, then this grief would lift and I could die. ↗

— Kenneth L. Patton

#grief #loss #poetry #death

WAKING AT NIGHT The blue river is grey at morning and evening. There is twilight at dawn and dusk. I lie in the dark wondering if this quiet in me now is a beginning or an end. ↗

— Jack Gilbert

#depression #life #poetry #silence #death

The stars are not wanted now: put out every one; Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun; Pour away the ocean and sweep up the wood. For nothing now can ever come to any good. ↗

— W.H. Auden

#grief #poetry #death