When I was walking in the mountains with the Japanese man and began to hear the water, he said, 'What is the sound of the waterfall?' 'Silence,' he finally told me.
In a cool solitude of trees Where leaves and birds a music spin, Mind that was weary is at ease, New rhythms in the soul begin.
Stirred...the fur-toothed graves of young boys...a thousand slain in the time it would take to do love with a pretty girl or think of a new God.
Creamy and leggy, with long azure hair and the eyes of a silent-movie star, she moved like a poem and smiled like a sphinx.
The blue river is grey at morning and evening. There is twilight at dawn and dusk. I lie in the dark wondering if this quiet in me now is a beginning or an end.
So nigh is grandeur to our dust, So near is God to man, When Duty whispers low, 'Thou must,' The youth whispers, 'I can.
Being there doesn't mean I'm present. I exist only in words. I want to be transmuted fully to white page and ink.
...you fantasize about me reading my poems to you - it doesn't work that way - I write down everything later - living is not an after-thought...
Certain voices heard are heard not because they are phonetic... But, from one soul they head, to another, in the form of magic. (Poem: When, When a not, Book: Ginger and Honey)
all night he talks and holds me, all night he loves me slow and careful.
Each today, well-lived, makes yesterday a dream of happiness and each tomorrow a vision of hope. Look, therefore, to this one day, for it and it alone is life.” —Sanskrit poem
Sigh. Here's another fine woman that historians can't believe was real. Of course she was real. Not only is there a splendid Chinese poem called "The Ballad of Mulan", there is also n excellent cartoon by Disney.
And so I told him how living in Japan would give him a leisure no mere tourist has, to know the rhythms of the place, a land of tiny poems.
Very possibly this was the night my white-knight complex, as Solange put it, would get me killed. Someone had better write a poem about it. It was only fair.
One writes a poem when one is so taken up by an emotional concept that one is unable to remain silent.
[poems are] crystals deposited after the effervescent contact of the spirit with reality. (cristaux deposes apres l'effervescent contact de l'esprit avec la realite)
Rain" Oh amiable rain Washer of trees and roofs who has prepared them for the pink ray of evening ("Poems")
Poetry had great powers over me from my childhood, and today the poems live in my memory which I read at the age of 7 or 8 years and which drove me to desperate attempts at imitation.
It is in books, poems, paintings which often give us the confidence to take seriously feelings in ourselves that we might otherwise never have thought to acknowledge.
Is not a critic," asks Professor Stoll, "... a judge, who does not explore his own consciousness, but determines the author's meaning or intention, as if the poem were a will, a contract, or the constitution?
Once outside the magic circle the writers became their lonely selves, pondering on poems, observing their fellow men ruthlessly, putting people they knew into novels; no wonder they were without friends.
