Do you know they found land mines in woman’s souls.

Each month is gay,Each season nice,When eatingChicken soupWith rice

There has fallen a splendid tearFrom the passion-flower at the gate.She is coming, my dove, my dear;She is coming, my life, my fate.The red rose cries, “She is near, she is near;”And the white rose...

Lines for WinterTell yourself as it gets cold and gray falls from the air that you will go on walking, hearing the same tune no matter where you find yourself— inside the dome of dark...

I too was pinched off from a piece of clay, I too modeled by omnipotence and flankedby things too wonderful for me

I know now that the poem in my head, the one that pushed me to the page, begged me – or dared me to be born is almost never the poem that comes out. I...

I do not write poetry; I take words and dip them in feelings.

One day when I ventured into the garden to regard its bloom,My eyes beheld on a bower a withered rose.When I inquired what had caused the blight,”My lips for a moment opened in a smile...

Que les poètes morts laissent la place aux autres. Et nous pourrions tout de même voir que c’est notre vénération devant ce qui a été déjà fait, si beau et si valable que ce soit,...

The JourneyOne day you finally knewwhat you had to do, and began,though the voices around youkept shoutingtheir bad advice –though the whole housebegan to trembleand you felt the old tugat your ankles.”Mend my life!”each voice...

My vegetable love will growVaster than empires, and more slow.

Tom Dancer’s gift of a whitebark pine coneYou never knowWhat opportunityIs going to travel to you,Or through you.Once a friend gave meA small pine cone-One of a fewHe found in the scatOf a grizzlyIn Utah...

Even when poetry has a meaning, as it usually has, it may be inadvisable to draw it out. Perfect understanding will sometimes almost extinguish pleasure.

A garden should make you feel you’ve entered privileged space — a place not just set apart but reverberant — and it seems to me that, to achieve this, the gardener must put some kind...

one must verge on the unknown, write toward the truth hitherto unrecognizable of one’s own sincerity, including the avoidable beauty of doom, shame, and embarrassment, that very area of personal self-recognition,(detailed individual is universal remember)...

I think that the habit of gloomy poetry is very funny. It’s like a special competition in losing.

Il était tard; ainsi qu’une médaille neuveLa pleine lune s’étalait,Et la solennité de la nuit, comme un fleuveSur Paris dormant ruisselait.

Choice, and all its attendant energy, is a characteristic of youth. It is before one chooses that one feels desire and longing without fulfillment, which gives an edge to any artistic endeavor. Galway Kinnell recently...

Our Beasts and our Thieves and our ChattelsHave weight for good or for ill;But the Poor are only His image,His presence, His word, His will; -And so Lazarus lies at our doorstepAnd Dives neglects him...

Poetry is the art of using language to transcend language.

Those moments before a poem comes, when the heightened awareness comes over you, and you realize a poem is buried there somewhere, you prepare yourself. I run around, you know, kind of skipping around the...

Life is beautiful. Death is astonishing.And love is the just breaths taken in between

Poetry is what happens when nothing else can.

She seems so cool, so focused, so quiet, yet her eyes remain fixed upon the horizon. You think you know all there is to know about her immediately upon meeting her, but everything you think...

holding a tiny dixie cup in my hand makes me feel like a giant human being that can crush things

Yo, múltiple, como en contradicción

when you’re younga pair offemalehigh-heeled shoesjust sittingalonein the closetcan fire yourbones;when you’re oldit’s justa pair of shoeswithoutanybodyin themandjust aswell.

Our love was bornoutside the walls,in the wind,in the night,in the earth,and that’s why the clay and the flower,the mud and the rootsknow your name.

Most people ignore most poetry because poetry ignores most people.

Brimming. That’s what it is, I want to get to a place where my sentences enact brimming.

When I talk of taking a trip I mean forever.

I never wanted to be saved, just loved in ways that would make the Gods jealous.

Hope springs eternal in the human breast; Man never Is, but always To be blest. The soul, uneasy, and confin’d from home, Rests and expatiates in a life to come.

Here is a greedy man who keeps to himselfThe beautiful pears ripe in his garden.

I’ve written some poetry I don’t understand myself

The nature of poemsIs a matter of words and deedsAn intimate encounter of voiceIn the ache of the heartIn the labor of breathingA hesitant casting of eyesAway from the mundane to seeThat delicate and shiny...

Poetry is the language of intensity. Because we are going to die, an expression of intensity is justified.

…my heart is a desolate field over which geese vee, the sky turns and the days lie fallow…

Poetry is an orphan of silence.

Failure: the renewable resource.

There is no competition of sounds between a nightingale and a violin.

If I could make people feel, just for a day or an hour, what it’s like to love with infiniteness, then they would be animals no longer, but some greater creature, deserving of that title...

Since there is no real silence, Silence will contain all the sounds, All the words, all the languages, All knowledge, all memory.

Here is the repeated image of the lover destroyed.

All people are enslaved by something.

As for political poetry, as it’s usually defined, it seems there’s very little good political poetry.

Long ago an uncalled rain fell and a called-upon God stayed equally distant.

If the poets offered us nothing more than another make-believe world, they would be mere sellers of drugs or, at best, sweetmeats.

If emptiness is empty, how can something be borne or awaken from it?

To be human is to be broken and broken is its own kind of beautiful.