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Read through the most famous quotes by topic #poetry
You can never rouse Harris. There is no poetry about Harris- no wild yearning for the unattainable. Harris never "weeps, he knows not why." If Harris's eyes fill with tears, you can bet it is because Harris has been eating raw onions, or has put too much Worcester over his chop. If you were to stand at night by the sea-shore with Harris, and say: "Hark! do you not hear? Is it but the mermaids singing deep below the waving waters; or sad spirits, chanting dirges for white corpses held by seaweed?" Harris would take you by the arm, and say: "I know what it is, old man; you've got a chill. Now you come along with me. I know a place round the corner here, where you can get a drop of the finest Scotch whisky you ever tasted- put you right in less than no time." Harris always does know a place round the corner where you can get something brilliant in the drinking line. I believe that if you met Harris up in Paradise (supposing such a thing likely), he would immediately greet you with: "So glad you've come, old fellow; I've found a nice place round the corner here, where you can get some really first-class nectar. ↗
Aeneas' mother is a star?" "No; a goddess." I said cautiously, "Venus is the power that we invoke in spring, in the garden, when things begin growing. And we call the evening star Venus." He thought it over. Perhaps having grown up in the country, among pagans like me, helped him understand my bewilderment. "So do we, he said. "But Venus also became more...With the help of the Greeks. They call her Aphrodite...There was a great poet who praised her in Latin. Delight of men and gods, he called her, dear nurturer. Under the sliding star signs she fills the ship-laden sea and the fruitful earth with her being; through her the generations are conceived and rise up to see the sun; from her the storm clouds flee; to her the earth, the skillful maker, offers flowers. The wide levels of the sea smile at her, and all the quiet sky shines and streams with light..." It was the Venus I had prayed to, it was my prayer, though I had no such words. They filled my eyes with tears and my heart with inexpressible joy. ↗
The Fallen It was the night a comet with its silver tail fell through darkness to earth's eroded field, the night I found the wolf, starved in metal trap, teeth broken from pain's hard bite, its belly swollen with unborn young. In our astronomy the Great Wolf lived in the sky. It was the mother of all women and howled her daughter's names into the winds of night. But the new people, whatever stepped inside their shadow, they would kill, whatever crossed their path, they came to fear. In their science, Wolf as not the mother. Wolf was not wind. They did not learn healing from her song. In their stories Wolf was the devil, falling down an empty, shrinking universe, God's Lucifer with yellow eyes that had seen their failings and knew that they could kill the earth, that they would kill each other. That night I threw the fallen stone back to sky and falling stars and watched it all come down to ruined earth again. Sky would not take back what it had done. That night, sky was a wilderness so close the eerie light of heaven and storming hands of sun reached down the swollen belly and dried up nipples of a hungry world. That night, I saw the trapper's shadow and it had four legs. ↗
Terror" There is something About you That seems so young So trusting This is the part of you that I most love And the part of you that I am most frightened to hurt Do you think the German poets When speaking of the terror of love Meant the terror that comes From knowing We can be harmed Or from knowing We have the power to hurt Of these two terrors The second is the greater Humanity's deeper fear Perhaps it is so Even with Americans Who arm their leaders Not for fear of being destroyed But because in disarming them for a moment All the harm done would be exposed Leaving the people Limping home in shame Like Oedipus Who was haunted by mirrors The terror that comes From knowing you have the power to hurt This is the greater fear Perhaps this is why our dogs Can look into our eyes Unflinchingly With unconditional love It is not because they are too stupid to know that someday We may casually break their hearts But because they are wise enough to know that They will never break ours ↗
won't you celebrate with me what i have shaped into a kind of life? i had no model. born in babylon both nonwhite and woman what did i see to be except myself? i made it up here on this bridge between starshine and clay, my one hand holding tight my other hand; come celebrate with me that everyday something has tried to kill me and has failed. ↗
#inspiration #life #national-poetry-month #poem-in-your-pocket-day #poetry
Title: Blue Light Lounge Sutra For The Performance Poets At Harold Park Hotel the need gotta be so deep words can't answer simple questions all night long notes stumble off the tongue & color the air indigo so deep fragments of gut & flesh cling to the song you gotta get into it so deep salt crystalizes on eyelashes the need gotta be so deep you can vomit up ghosts & not feel broken till you are no more than a half ounce of gold in painful brightness you gotta get into it blow that saxophone so deep all the sex & dope in this world can't erase your need to howl against the sky the need gotta be so deep you can't just wiggle your hips & rise up out of it chaos in the cosmos modern man in the pepperpot you gotta get hooked into every hungry groove so deep the bomb locked in rust opens like a fist into it into it so deep rhythm is pre-memory the need gotta be basic animal need to see & know the terror we are made of honey cause if you wanna dance this boogie be ready to let the devil use your head for a drum ↗
The blond boy in the red trunks is holding your head underwater because he is trying to kill you, and you deserve it, you do, and you know this, and you are ready to die in this swimming pool because you wanted to touch his hands and lips and this means your life is over anyway. You’re in eighth grade. You know these things. You know how to ride a dirt bike, and you know how to do long division, and you know that a boy who likes boys is a dead boy, unless he keeps his mouth shut, which is what you didn't do, because you are weak and hollow and it doesn't matter anymore. ↗
When I throw back my head and howl People (women mostly) say But you've always done what you want, You always get your way - A perfectly vile and foul Inversion of all that's been. What the old ratbags mean Is I've never done what I don't. So the shit in the shuttered chateau Who does his five hundred words Then parts out the rest of the day Between bathing and booze and birds Is far off as ever, but so Is that spectacled schoolteaching sod (Six kids, and the wife in pod, And her parents coming to stay)... Life is an immobile, locked, Three-handed struggle between Your wants, the world's for you, and (worse) The unbeatable slow machine That brings what you'll get. Blocked, They strain round a hollow stasis Of havings-to, fear, faces. Days sift down it constantly. Years. --The Life with the Hole in It ↗
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