Here is Menard’s own intimate forest: ‘Now I am traversed by bridle paths, under the seal of sun and shade…I live in great density…Shelter lures me. I slump down into the thick foliage…In the forest,...

A poem in the heart is worthmore than a million dollarsin the bank account.

Be still, sad heart! and cease repining;Behind the clouds is the sun still shining;Thy fate is the common fate of all,Into each life some rain must fall

Not words. nor laughter. but rather someonewho will fall in lovewith your silence.

Dancing falls into the same category as poetry for a woman – it equals dreaming, which may inspire thoughts about such banned topics as love and desire.

in the afterglowof an evening raini lay downin the grass and think of youmy body acheslike an after-kissbreaking in soft firesand wildflowersmy dear, i will always bethis tender for you.

Words are what sticks to the real. We use them to push the real, to drag the real into the poem. They are what we hold on with, nothing else. They are as valuable in...

Your daughter is ugly.She knows loss intimately,carries whole cities in her belly.As a child, relatives wouldn’t hold her.She was splintered wood and sea water.They said she reminded them of the war.On her fifteenth birthday you...

Of the many forms that silence takes, the most memorable is the dry husk of the cicada.

O rose, you look sick.O rose, wake up and sing.

willow trees, willow trees they remind me of DesdemonaI’m so damned literary

Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman.

With a little more time, patience, and hard work, and above all with a more sensitive taste for the formal aspects of arts, he would have managed to write mediocre poetry, good enough for a...

All beautiful distractions, ignites from you.

Each Moment a White Bull Steps Shining into the World If the gods bring to youa strange and frightening creature,accept the giftas if it were one you had chosen. Say the accustomed prayers,oil the hooves...

The sea, the sea…Man alone,Passive, unawareIn his elemental sadness.

I don’t analyze beautiful. I sit in its presence and love the wholeness of it–the sweet and sad and raw and bright together.Poetry is that, the weaving of light-shadow. Making words from the unwordable.

I had a theory; I’m not sure if it was my own but it worked for me. Public spaces, such as streets and subway stations, became inhabitable as I assigned them some value and imprinted...

They were learning that New York had another life, too — subterranean, like almost everything that was human in the city — a life of writers meeting in restaurants at lunchtime or in coffee houses...

INTO MY OWNOne of my wishes is that those dark trees,So old and firm they scarcely show the breeze,Were not, as ’twere, the merest mask of gloom,But stretched away unto the edge of doom.I should...

MiaowConsider me.I sit here like Tiberius,inscrutable and grand.I will let “I dare not”wait upon “I would”and bear the twanglingof your small guitarbecause you are my owland foster me with milk.Why wet my paw?Just keep me...

I am not yours, not lost in you,Not lost, although I long to beLost as a candle lit at noon,Lost as a snowflake in the sea.You love me, and I find you stillA spirit beautiful...

It is the job of poetry to clean up our word-clogged reality by creating silences around things.

We can’t choose our poetic fathers any more than our biological ones — but we can choose how to come to terms with them.

That life is simply a collection of little lives, each lived one day at a time. That each day should be spent finding beauty in flowers and poetry and talking to animals. That a day...

He that is thy friend indeed,He will help thee in thy need:If thou sorrow, he will weep;If thou wake, he cannot sleep:Thus of every grief in heartHe with thee doth bear a part.These are certain...

Poverty of young men alone behind thestairways, who practicealchemy inside bottle caps, who knowthe altruism of a last syringe.

This seems to me a philosophical question, and therefore irrelevant, question. A poet’s destiny is to love.

Always dream big and dare to believe!

I didn’t know the demonsthat walked across your memory.They came from the dustwhen you were at peacein your grave.

Only a poet can translate for the dead.

I like the imp / in impossibility

The war to preserve the privilege of mythmaking

what if you get most of what the eye sees?what if love came in seeds?what if we plant them and they grow trees? what if they form hearts instead of leafs?what if hate was to...

I found the poems in the fields,And only wrote them down.

an English girl might well believethat time is how you spend your love.

Early Summer, loveliest season, The world is being colored in. While daylight lasts on the horizon, Sudden, throaty blackbirds sing. The dusty-colored cuckoo cuckoos.”Welcome, summer” is what he says. Winter’s unimaginable. The wood’s a wickerwork...

so much of the world is plunged in darkness and chaos…So ring the bells that still can ringForget your perfect offeringThere is a crack in everythingThat’s how the light gets in.

Beyond myself, somewhere, I wait for my arrival.

inspiration. five minutes in the back of a greyhound bus; the world passing by.a gateway to freedom.the american dream.from “the american dream

My tears of joyhear the raindrops crying,as the rain never wants to pourdown on my cloudy dayswhen I makeour love-dreamsfor the sun to dreamonly for you….(From the poem “Only For You” By Munia Khan)

In this quiet place on a quiet streetwhere no one ever finds usgently, lovingly, freedom gives back our pain.–from poem In a Quiet Place on a Quiet Street

Forge your iron; shape it by force, not into a flower you already know but into what can also be a flower if you think it is and it is so.

Aristocracy naturally leads the human mind to the contemplation of the past, and fixes it there. Democracy, on the contrary, gives men a sort of instinctive distaste for what is ancient. In this respect aristocracy...

PricklyWhen I’m feelingporcupine-y,I get nasty,I get whiny.Stay away orI might stick you.My sharp words arequills to prick you.

Our past sins, our fractured lives–soon nothing but drowned stars in dark skies.

My anxiety house a house and a fence and a deer in the yard. A zip code. A plague of starlings.

I fain would follow love, if that could be; I needs must follow death, who calls for me; Call and I follow, I follow! let me die.

Bezgove ure”To je stari bezeg za hišo. To so bezgove ure.Grozljivo zelena tesnoba listov.Črnikasta barva jagod. Grenki bezgov čas pred nevihto. Pod zidom vetje kopriv.Nepokošena trava.Za zidom soba.Preležani duh samskih stricev.Votlo bezgovo steblo nedelje.Poobedna tihota.Rdečkasti...

I am in the middle of it: chaos and poetry; poetry and love and again, complete chaos. Pain, disorder, occasional clarity; and at the bottom of it all: only love; poetry. Sheer enchantment, fear, humiliation....