#poetry

I use rock and jazz and blues rhythms because I love that music. I hope my poetry has a relationship with good-time rock'n roll. ↗

— Adrian Mitchell

#blues #hope #i #i love #jazz

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

#poem #poetry #life

Song of Myself I have heard what the talkers were talking, the talk of the beginning and the end, But I do not talk of the beginning or the end. There was never any more inception than there is now, Nor any more youth or age than there is now, And will never be any more perfection than there is now, Nor any more heaven or hell than there is now. ↗

— Walt Whitman

#poetry #age

Our age has built itself vast reservoirs of power / formless as the straining energy that it wrests from the earth. ↗

— Rainer Maria Rilke

#age

You have shown me a love that cannot be given or taken let us back in the fullness of ourselves a simple kiss now blood and breath both awakened a balanced diet to sustain life and health. ↗

— Saul Williams Said the Shotgun to the head

#diet

Though much is taken, much abides; and though We are not now that strength which in old days Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are; One equal temper of heroic hearts, Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield. ↗

— Alfred Tennyson

#heroism #poetry #ulysses #age

Everyone I have lost in the closing of a door the click of the lock is not forgotten, they do not die but remain within the soft edges of the earth, the ash of house fires and cancer in sin and forgiveness huddled under old blankets dreaming their way into my hands, my heart closing tight like fists. - "Indian Boy Love Song #1 ↗

— Sherman Alexie

#business

And it was at that age … poetry arrived in search of me. I don’t know, I don’t know where it came from, from winter or a river. I don’t know how or when, no they were not voices, they were not words, nor silence, but from a street I was summoned, from the branches of night, abruptly from the others, among violent fires or returning alone. There I was without a face, and it touched me. I did not know what to say, my mouth had no way with names, my eyes were blind, and something started in my soul, fever or forgotten wings, and I made my own way, deciphering that fire, and I wrote the first faint line, faint, without substance, pure nonsense, pure wisdom of someone who knows nothing, and suddenly I saw the heavens unfastened and open, planets, palpitating plantations, shadow perforated, riddled with arrows, fire and flowers, the winding night, the universe. And I, infinitesimal being, drunk with the great starry void, likeness, image of mystery, felt myself a pure part of the abyss, I wheeled with the stars, my heart broke loose on the wind. ↗

— Pablo Neruda

#age

Desire, loneliness, wind in the flowering almond— surely these are the great, the inexhaustible subjects to which my predecessors apprenticed themselves. I hear them echo in my own heart, disguised as convention. ↗

— Louise Glück

#age

Everyone should be forcibly transplanted to another continent from their family at the age of three. ↗

— Philip Larkin

#letters-to-monica #philip-larkin #poem #poet #poetry