posted March 23, 2014 12:04 PM            

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To me, there is a breath of poetry, like an uneasy waft of fresh air at dawn, before it is light. There is an acceptance of the limitations of consciousness, and a leaning up against the sun-imbued world of chaos. It is poetry at the moment of inception in the soul, before the germs of the known and the unknown have fused to begin a new body of concepts. And therefore it is useless to quote fragments. They are too nebulous and not there . Yet in the whole there is a breath of real poetry, the essential quality of poetry. It makes a new act of attention, and wakes us to a nascent world of inner and outer suns. And it has the poetic faith in the chaotic splendour of suns.

*

When we get out of the glass bottles of our ego,
and when we escape like squirrels turning in the
cages of our personality
and get into the forests again,
we shall shiver with cold and fright
but things will happen to us
so that we don't know ourselves.

Cool, unlying life will rush in,
and passion will make our bodies taut with power,
we shall stamp our feet with new power
and old things will fall down,
we shall laugh, and institutions will curl up like
burnt paper.

~D.H. Lawrence

posted March 24, 2014 10:51 PM            

ADD 3/25 *

(music) Where'er You Walk (Semele, GF Handel) [4:51] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dFi4yEyTZXE

posted March 26, 2014 09:37 AM            

Mirage what a beautiful reply..the song, the thought,-all.

posted April 03, 2014 12:02 AM            

"Poetry heals the wounds inflicted by reason."
----Novalis

posted April 03, 2014 11:03 AM            

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LOVE: A word properly applied to our delight in particular kinds of food; sometimes metaphorically spoken of the favorite objects of all our appetites.

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I am content; that is a blessing greater than riches; and he to whom that is given need ask no more.

~Fielding

posted April 11, 2014 01:49 PM            

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The artist, and particularly the poet, is always an anarchist in the best sense of the word. He must heed only the call that arises within him from three strong voices: the voice of death, with all its foreboding, the voice of love and the voice of art.

*

The important thing in life is to let the years carry us along.

posted April 11, 2014 01:50 PM            

One little
One golden
Of bliss wingéd
With flying feet
One vision golden
Of the sun and the sea
One precise moment
Of clarity.

*

If it were not for you
I would not enjoy quiet
Neither the moonlight, nor the stars,
Nor could I appreciate the fountains
Whose cool fingers
Wander among violets.

And it is because of you
Because you are beautiful
That I weave colors in the sun
Through whose great garden we have strayed unveiled
Chaste, interlaced,
With broken thoughts, half-spun.

posted April 23, 2014 09:02 AM            

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You can have the other words-chance, luck, coincidence, serendipity. I'll take grace. I don't know what it is exactly, but I'll take it.

*

Sometimes I need
only to stand
wherever I am
to be blessed.

*

For poems are not words, after all, but fires for the cold, ropes let down to the lost, something as necessary as bread in the pockets of the hungry.

*

Love yourself. Then forget it.
Then, love the world.

*

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
For a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves.

*

...I don't know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?

~Mary Oliver

posted April 29, 2014 02:52 PM            

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It is of immense importance to learn to laugh at ourselves.

*

I always felt that the great high privilege, relief and comfort of friendship was that one had to explain nothing.

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If only one could tell true love from false love as one can tell mushrooms from toadstools. With mushrooms it is so simple — you salt them well, put them aside and have patience. But with love, you have no sooner lighted on anything that bears even the remotest resemblance to it than you are perfectly certain it is not only a genuine specimen, but perhaps the only genuine mushroom ungathered.
~Katherine Mansfield

posted April 29, 2014 03:40 PM            

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Write in the morning, revise in the afternoon, read at night, and spend the rest of your time exercising your diplomacy, stealth, and charm.

*

Metaphors are our way of losing ourselves in semblances or treading water in a sea of seeming.

*

You can woo a girl with a poem, but you can't hold onto her with a poem. Not even with a poetry movement.

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Reading is never a waste of time.

~ Roberto Bolaño

posted May 06, 2014 08:30 AM            

Reading Tagore I thought of this: the lamp, the path, the jug in the spring, the bare feet, they are a lost world. Here are the electric light bulbs, the automobiles, the water faucet, the jet airliners. No one tells stories. Television and movies have replaced the grandparents, and all of technology approaches the miraculous in order to tell of soaps and tooth pastes.

I don't know why I walk, but I must come to this tenderness of Tagore, of all oriental poetry that substitutes the girl with the jug on her shoulder
for our efficient and impoverished typist. After all, we have the same clouds, the same stars, and if we only look, the same sea.

This office girl too likes love. And in this chaos of papers that dirty the days, there are pages of white dreams that she guards with care, clippings of tendernesses with which she challenges the solitude.

posted May 16, 2014 11:37 AM            

"The woods call to us with a hundred voices, but the sea has one only — a mighty voice that drowns our souls in its majestic music. The woods are human, but the sea is of the company of the archangels."

"That is one good thing about this world...there are always sure to be more springs."

"If it's in you to climb, you must-there are those who must lift their eyes to the hills--they can't breathe properly in the valleys."

"It's delightful when your imaginations come true, isn't?"

"The world calls them its singers and poets and artists and storytellers; but they are just people who have never forgotten the way to fairyland."

"I know that in everybody's life must come days of depression and discouragement when all things in life seem to lose savour. The sunniest day has its clouds; but one must not forget the sun is there all the time."

"Humor is the spiciest condiment in the feast of existence. Laugh at your mistakes but learn from them, joke over your troubles but gather strength from them, make a jest of your difficulties but overcome them."

"When you've learned to laugh at the things that should be laughed at, and not to laugh at those that shouldn't, you've got wisdom and understanding."

". . . there's no use trying to live in other people's opinions. The only thing to do is live in your own"

"Perhaps, after all, romance did not come into one’s life with pomp and blare, like a gay knight riding down; perhaps it crept to one’s side like an old friend through quiet ways; perhaps it revealed itself in seeming prose, until some sudden shaft of illumination flung athwart its pages betrayed the rhythm and the music; perhaps . . . perhaps . . . love unfolded naturally out of a beautiful friendship, as a golden-hearted rose slipping from its green sheath."

"If I really wanted to pray I'll tell you what I'd do. I'd go out into a great big field alone or into the deep, deep woods, and I'd look up into the sky - up - up - up- into that lovely blue sky that looks like there's no end to it's blueness. And then I'd just feel a prayer."

~L.M. Montgomery