There is some kiss we want
with our whole lives,
the touch of Spirit on the body.
At night, I open the window
and ask the moon to come
and press its face against mine.
Breathe into me.
Poetry is the story of your life set to verse.
" I thought i was , but i'm not , what i was , or what i thought."
Enough
These few words are enough, if not these words,this breath...
If not this breath, this sitting
This opening to the life we have refused
again and again until now. Until now.
In this moment of epiphany
This opening to the life we have refused
again and again
until NOW
~david whyte
Enough
These few words are enough, if not these words,this breath...
If not this breath, this sitting
This opening to the life we have refused
again and again until now. Until now.
In this moment of epiphany
This opening to the life we have refused
again and again
until NOW
~david whyte
Only when a man's interior warriors are strong enough can he go into the joy of display.
With this strength he can also enter into the delight of form. Shapeless clothing, verse that is sloppy, chaotic furnishings: all are linked in secret ways to shame. The universe is not ashamed, and it delights in form. The sun rising over the ocean and setting in the ocean, the moon's lonely shinings and hidings, the leaves unfolding and falling are its displays.
Poetry is a form of display. The poet bird repeats vowels and consonants in order to widen his tail. Meter and counted syllables make up a peacock tail. The poem is a dance done for some being in the other world.
If, as Nalungiaq says, "in the very earliest time... people and animals... spoke the same language," then the rectification of language requires closeness with our animal nature. Then the vitality of our language resides as much in the sound of our words and beat of their rhythms as in their meanings. That's why Lorca puts the poetry of duende together with song, dance, and bull-fighting, and that's why poems belong more to speaking than to reading, more to passionate declamation and ecstatic jubilation, keening, crying, and screaming, and to the secret whispers of lovers' lips than to typed lines on bleached paper. Good language asks to be spoken aloud, mind to mind and heart to heart, by embodied voices that still retain the animal and by tongues that still delight in savoring vowels and the clipped splitting of explosive consonants.
We live in a poetically underdeveloped nation. Men blame their own lives for a deficiency in the culture. For, without the fanciful delicacy and the powerful truths that poems convey, emotions and imagination flatten out. There's a lack of spirit, of vision. The loss in the heart appears as a loss of heart to take up the great cultural challenges that are part of every man's citizenship.
...art is something subversive. It's something that should not be free. Art and liberty, like the fire of Prometheus, are things that one must steal, to be used against the established order.
...why did Plato say that poets should be chased out of the republic? Precisely because every poet and every artist is an antisocial being. He's not that way because he wants to be; he can't be any other way.... and if he really is an artist it is in his nature not to want to be admitted, because if he is admitted it can only mean he is doing something which is understood, approved, and therefore old hat - worthless. Anything new, anything worth doing, can't be recognized.
...the right to free expression is something one seizes, not something one is given.... if it does exist, it exists to be used against the established order.... There is absolute opposition between the artist and the state.
So there's only one tactic for the state: kill the seers.
Happy in the morning
I open my cottage door;
A clear breeze blowing
Comes straight in.
The first sun
Lights the leafy trees;
The shadows it casts
Are crystal clear.
Serene,
In accord with my heart,
Everything merges
In one harmony.
Gain and loss
Are not my concern;
This way is enough
To the end of my days.
For us, there is only the trying.
The rest is not our business.
Dance, when you're broken open
Dance, if you've torn the bandage off
Dance in the middle of the fighting
Dance in your blood
Dance, when you're perfectly free
The Iranian Girl
There's a hole in the ground
A moving of earth, now made
A sad depression
Where once she played in
Puddle-rain
Splashing with the joy that comes
From child-like feet
The sound is still here
In the air, the breeze yet carrying
The secret laughter
That haunts the waking hours of those
Who've lost the way
How vain to think that
Memory can be erased
All will remember
No one escapes
I wonder if she saw it
The moment before
Her hair still flying free
The metal catching that last
Pure glint of sun
Did she hear the explosion
That made no sense
Did she feel
Her body come apart
And fall like dust, too soon
Does anyone ask
Whatever she felt, whatever she dreamed
Her dreaming time is gone
And no lofty word of God or
Glory will ever make it right
Dare to listen and you will
Hear her
Dare to open your eyes and see
The Iranian girl
No different
Like you, like me.
ODE TO AN ENDANGERED SPECIES
Will you not leave us here too long
We have not paid attention
To squander the best of the world
A pity we do not understand
Ourselves
No more you fly in the wind
No more the buoyant ripples on a pristine pool
The splash of color in a worn-tore land
No more
The survivor's sad lament
Yet no weeping will there be when
Your perfect, singular form
Vanishes
The muted salting of a wounded Earth
And all that is and all that ever was will
In some way be
Diminished
For the loss, though unnoticed
Will be recognized
In the stillness of eternal night.
"But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams."
Poetry is the art of using language to transcend language.
One day You will take
my heart completely
and make it more fiery
than a dragon. Your
eyelashes will write on
my heart the poem
that could never come
from the pen of a poet.
"Sonnet," by Billy Collins
All we need is fourteen lines, well, thirteen now,
and after this one just a dozen
to launch a little ship on love’s storm-tossed seas,
then only ten more left like rows of beans.
How easily it goes unless you get Elizabethan
and insist the iambic bongos must be played
and rhymes positioned at the ends of lines,
one for every station of the cross.
But hang on here while we make the turn
into the final six where all will be resolved,
where longing and heartache will find an end,
where Laura will tell Petrarch to put down his pen,
take off those crazy medieval tights,
blow out the lights, and come at last to bed.
"Out of pain, comes poetry."
"Out of pain, comes poetry."
Last night as I was sleeping,
I dreamt - marvellous error! -
that a spring was breaking
out in my heart
I said: Along which secret aqueduct
Oh water, are you coming to me,
water of a new life
that I have never drunk?
Last night as I was sleeping,
I dreamt - marvellous error! -
that I had a beehive
here inside my heart.
And the golden bees
were making white combs
and sweet honey
from my old failures.
Last night as I was sleeping,
I dreamt - marvellous error! -
that a fiery sun was giving
light inside my heart.
It was fiery because I felt,
warmth as from a hearth,
and sun because it gave light
and brought tears to my eyes.
Last night as I was sleeping,
I dreamt - marvellous error! -
That it was God I had
here inside my heart.
"Poets…are masters of us ordinary men, in knowledge of the mind, because they drink at streams…not yet made accessible to science."
You know what comes next, of course. You know I'm writing this at my desk, on a Thursday, and day after tomorrow I'll put on bib overalls, the neighbors thinking what an affectation, and pull weeds for the composter, and dig a place for a late row of greens, most of them going to seed instead of in the pot, and tell myself what the hell, I just want to dig the dirt and watch the stuff grow, an educated fool at last.
*excerpt from Educated Fool
Listen.
In every office
you hear the threads
of love and joy and fear and guilt,
the cries for celebration and reassurance,
and somehow you know that connecting those threads
is what you are supposed to do
and business takes care of itself.
Hail to those who have come from the sunlight that surrounds you
Pray for those who have gone from the sunlight that surrounds you
Hail to those who have come from the sunlight that surrounds you
Pray for those who have gone from the sunlight that surrounds you
Pretend all the good things are for you
Hail to those who have come from the sunlight that surrounds you
Hail to whatever you’ve found in the sunlight that surrounds you
Pretend all the good things are for you,
pretend all the good things are for me too
And the weather changes not halfway between your house and mine
Pretend all the good things are for you,
pretend all the good things are for me too
And the weather changes not halfway between your house and mine
And all of the good things are for me,
and all of the good things are for you too
And the weather changes not halfway between your house and mine
Poetry is Truth, but not necessarily reality.
A poet is a bird of unearthly excellence, who escapes from his celestial realm and arrives in this world warbling. If we do not cherish him, he spreads his wings and flies back to his homeland.
The true poem rests between the words.
The poet of today ...is profoundly inhibited by the dearth of shared consciousness of myth. Our current motivating ideas are not myths but ideologies, lacking transcendental significance. This loss of myth-consciousness I believe to be the most devastating loss that humanity can suffer; for ... myth-consciousness is the bond that unites men both with one another and with the unplumbed Mystery from which mankind is sprung and without reference to which the radical significance of things goes to pot. Now a world bereft of radical significance is not long tolerated; it leaves me radically unstable, so that they will seize at any myth or pseudo-myth that is offered.
