The more formidable the contradiction between inexhaustible life-joy and inevitable fate, the greater the longing which reveals itself in the kingdom of poetry and in the self-created world of dreams hopes to banish the dark...

When a man has many women in his life to cater to, one of them is bound to come last.

Inexpensive ProgressEncase your legs in nylons,Bestride your hills with pylonsO age without a soul;Away with gentle willowsAnd all the elmy billowsThat through your valleys roll.Let’s say goodbye to hedgesAnd roads with grassy edgesAnd winding country...

Waktu berjalan ke Barat di waktu pagi hari matahari mengikutiku di belakang.Aku berjalan mengikuti bayang-bayangku sendiri yang memanjang di depan.Aku dan matahari tidak bertengkar tentang siapa di antara kami yang telah menciptakan bayang-bayang,aku dan bayang-bayang...

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...

An editorial in the Los Angeles Times [1923] wistfully asked, ‘Will eating chestnuts by crackling log fires become one of the lost arts preserved by a devoted people only in poetry and romance?

To the bottle in the ditch, to the scoopin the oats, to air in the lunglet evening come.Let it come, as it will, and don’tbe afraid. God does not leave uscomfortless, so let evening come.

The yard was a little centre of regeneration. Here, with keen edges and smooth curves, were forms in the exact likeness of those he had seen abraded and time-eaten on the walls. These were the...

Come to the beach with meAnd watch the pelicans die,Hear their feeble screamsCalling to an empty skyWhere once they playedAnd scouted for food,Not scavenging like the gullsBut plummeting unafraidInto friendly waters.Come to the beach with...

Freud could never be certain, he said,in view of his wide and early reading,whether what seemed like a new creationmight not be the work insteadof hidden channels of memory leadingback to the notions of others...

Poetry can be more eloquent than the most eloquent sermons, and it becomes a weapon more formidable than the sharpest of swords; whenever such a poem–which finds its correct tune and conveys the excitement of...

Fragmentary BlueWhy make so much of fragmentary blueIn here and there a bird, or butterfly,Or flower, or wearing-stone, or open eye,When heaven presents in sheets the solid hue?Since earth is earth, perhaps, not heaven (as...

You love meand love me notyour love is an arm of clockjoining hands with mineonly to leave me again

The NetI made you many and many a song, Yet never one told all you are–It was as though a net of words Were flung to catch a star;It was as though I curved my...

And so I pray I am today as honestwith myself, with life all around me and below and above me,with all who I encounter.

From the time I began to read, as a child, I loved to feel their heft in my hand and the warm spot caused by their intimate weight in my lap; I loved the crisp...

Cities are built out of poet’s dreams.

I love the way he says my name. With the elegance and utmost respect of a King, just before he bows to his Queen.

How do I learn to speakwhen silence is all I know?

That tingle in the brain is called a word.It bats itself against its fleshy bounds.

I’m not aspiring to be someone else – If I’m me for the rest of my life then so be it

Poems should be like pins which prick the skin of boredom and leave a glow equal in its pride to the gate of the sadist who stuck the pin and walked away

No poem ever bought a hamburger, or not too many.

The same that oft-times hath charm’d magic casements, opening on the foam of perilous seas, in fairy lands forlorn.

Tonight, I won’t dream, because nobodyhas held me and no hands have strayed and eventhough I’m drunk with love, my arms are empty.

Recently I’ve been dreamingof cursing old peoplewith little provocation,because their culturehas a long history of enslaving,raping, and segregating,and they have special lightswhich prevent us from dancing.

first of all nothing will happen and a little laternothing will happen again

never trust anyone who says they do not see color. this means to them,you are invisible.

How do I feel today? I feel as unfit as an unfiddle,And it is the result of a certain turbulence in the mind and an uncertain burbulence in the middle.What was it, anyway, that angry...

The moon shines in my body, but my blind eyes cannot see it:The moon is within me, and so is the sun.The unstruck drum of Eternity is sounded within me; but my deaf ears cannot...

Hearts rebuilt from hope resurrect dreams killed by hate.

A silent velvet footstep filled me, unwelcome yet so needed. You finally found my hidden shore with grains of time and ocean of the most secret secrets, violet and red; left a trail of deep...

I am born with WINGS, that is my DESTINY’..says the butterfly..’Just let me come into my own’…

We wanderers, ever seeking the lonelier way, begin no day where we have ended another day; and no sunrise finds us where sunset left us. Even while the earth sleeps we travel. We are the...

I write to taste life twice; to savour the flavour of sweet times gone by, or spit out the bitterness before it multiplies.

True and false fears let us refrain, Let us love nobly, and live, and add again Years and years unto years, till we attain To write threescore: this is the second of our reign.

Tears, idle tears, I know not what they mean, Tears from the depths of some devine despairRise in the heart, and gather to the eyes, In looking on the happy autumn fields, And thinking of...

The clouds above us join and separate,The breeze in the courtyard leaves and returns.Life is like that, so why not relax?Who can stop us from celebrating?

All paths lead to death, our premature sacrifice for future spawn(from Elixir)

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...