Night Poems Quotes & Sayings

In the hours waking,
when we're still all still,
and you can hear the floorboards creaking,
and you can feel the shades blow in,
the night we slept with,
we'll never kiss like that again.
Our lips, will sever,
our memories, will dissipate,
and our shadows will be swallowed by the sky. — Dave Matthes

There is dew
on these poems in the morning,
and at night a cool breeze may rise from them.
In the winter they are blankets, in the summer a place to swim.
I like talking to you like this. Have you moved
a step closer?
Soon we may be
kissing. — Kabir

let me die
from having being drunk on
indigo skies, my liver...
overflowing with stars. — Sanober Khan

I would like a simple life / yet all night I am laying / poems away in a long box. — Anne Sexton

Hour of Stars (1920) The round silence of night, one note on the stave of the infinite. Ripe with lost poems, I step naked into the street. The blackness riddled by the singing of crickets: sound, that dead will-o'-the-wisp, that musical light perceived by the spirit. A thousand butterfly skeletons sleep within my walls. A wild crowd of young breezes over the river. — Federico Garcia Lorca

Winkin', Blinkin', and Nod, one night sailed off in a wooden shoe;
Sailed off on a river of crystal light into a sea of dew.
"Where are you going and what do you wish?" the old moon asked the three.
"We've come to fish for the herring fish that live in this beautiful sea.
Nets of silver and gold have we," said Winkin', Blinkin', and Nod. — Eugene Field

Read poems to yourself in the middle of the night. Turn on a single lamp and read them while you're alone in an otherwise dark room or while someone else sleeps next to you. Read them when you're wide awake in the early morning, fully alert. Say them over to yourself in a place where silence reigns and the din of the culture - the constant buzzing noise that surrounds us - has momentarily stopped. These poems have come from a great distance to find you. — Edward Hirsch

Transformations
All night he ran, his body air,
But that was in another year.
Lately the answered shape of his laughter,
The shape of his smallest word, is fire.
He who is a fierce young crier
Of poems will be as tranquil as water,
Keeping, in sunset glow, the pure
Image of limitless desire;
Then enter earth and come to be,
Inch by inch, geography. — Stanley Kunitz

The round silence of night,
one note on the stave
of the infinite.

Ripe with lost poems,
I step naked into the street.
The blackness riddled
by the singing of crickets:
sound,
that dead
will-o'-the-wisp,
that musical light
perceived
by the spirit.

A thousand butterfly skeletons
sleep within my walls.

A wild crowd of young breezes
over the river.

- Hour of Stars (1920) — Federico Garcia Lorca

THE ALIENS
from The Last Night Of The Earth Poems

you may not believe it
but there are people
who go through life with
very little
friction of distress.
they dress well, sleep well.
they are contented with
their family
life.
they are undisturbed
and often feel
very good.
and when they die
it is an easy death, usually in their
sleep.

you may not believe
it
but such people do
exist.

but i am not one of
them.
oh no, I am not one of them,
I am not even near
to being
one of
them.
but they
are there

and I am
here. — Charles Bukowski

Beyond the Years

I the years the answer lies,
Beyond where brood the grieving skies
And Night drops tears.
Where Faith rod-chastened smiles to rise
And doff its fears,
And carping Sorrow pines and dies -
Beyond the years.

II

Beyond the years the prayer for rest
Shall beat no more within the breast;
The darkness clears,
And Morn perched on the mountain's crest
Her form uprears -
The day that is to come is best,
Beyond the years.

III

Beyond the years the soul shall find
That endless peace for which it pined,
For light appears,
And to the eyes that still were blind
With blood and tears,
Their sight shall come all unconfined
Beyond the years. — Paul Laurence Dunbar

when I finally begin to drift
into sleep
your memory is the...first
and the moonlight
the last, to kiss my face. — Sanober Khan

A poetess who had died young of cancer had said in one of her poems that for her, on sleepless nights, 'the night offers toads and black dogs and corpses of the drowned. — Yasunari Kawabata

Through the darkest hours of the night
and through the dreamers realm I seek,
Far beyond the starry sky
and beyond galaxies I am free.
Through the grimmest memories
and past a seasons air I cannot breathe,
Far beyond this mortal world
in an afterlife we shall meet. — Lee Argus

Success"

If you want a thing bad enough
To go out and fight for it,
Work day and night for it,
Give up your time and your peace and your sleep for it

If only desire of it
Makes you quite mad enough
Never to tire of it,
Makes you hold all other things tawdry and cheap for it

If life seems all empty and useless without it
And all that you scheme and you dream is about it,

If gladly you'll sweat for it,
Fret for it,
Plan for it,
Lose all your terror of God or man for it,

If you'll simply go after that thing that you want.
With all your capacity,
Strength and sagacity,
Faith, hope and confidence, stern pertinacity,

If neither cold poverty, famished and gaunt,
Nor sickness nor pain
Of body or brain
Can turn you away from the thing that you want,

If dogged and grim you besiege and beset it,
You'll get it! — Berton Braley

The other gift - a book of poems, called, "The Cowardly Morning" - Waner put on Corinne's desk at the office, with a note saying, "This man is Coleridge and Blake and Rilke all in one, and more."
She didn't pick up the book again until she was in bed, late that night.
[...]
The first poem was the title poem. This time Corinne read it through aloud. But still she didn't hear it. She read it through a third time, and heard some of it. She read it through a fourth time, and heard all of it. It was the poem containing the lines:
'Not wasteland, but a great inverted forest
with all foliage underground.'
As though it might be best to look immediately for shelter, Corinne had to put the book down. At any moment the apartment building seemed liable to lose its balance and topple across Fifth Avenue into Central Park. She waited. Gradually the deluge of truth and beauty abated.
- The Inverted Forest (1947) — J.D. Salinger

SPRING Somewhere a black bear has just risen from sleep and is staring down the mountain. All night in the brisk and shallow restlessness of early spring I think of her, her four black fists flicking the gravel, her tongue like a red fire touching the grass, the cold water. There is only one question: how to love this world. I think of her rising like a black and leafy ledge to sharpen her claws against the silence of the trees. Whatever else my life is with its poems and its music and its glass cities, it is also this dazzling darkness coming down the mountain, breathing and tasting; all day I think of her - her white teeth, her wordlessness, her perfect love. — Mary Oliver

And there was no entertainment for them at night. They were too poor to own a television set. But they seemed content. Truman with his sculpting and building the recreation center. Lynne writing poems occasionally, reading them to her friends, then tearing them up. — Alice Walker

Yes, I read. I have that absurd habit. I like beautiful poems, moving poetry, and all the beyond of that poetry. I am extraordinarily sensitive to those poor, marvelous words left in our dark night by a few men I never knew. — Louis Aragon

Poetry is like an unexpected noise in the night: the creak of a door, a footstep on the porch, the soft scuffle of a moth against the screen, which rouses every sense to an instant alert. So comes poetry to the drowsy mind, which startles a moment, wonders, and returns to sleep. — Christopher Morley

Begin. Keep on beginning. Nibble on everything.
Take a hike. Teach yourself to whistle. Lie.
The older you get the more they'll want your stories.
Make them up. Talk to stones. Short-out electric
fences. Swim with the sea turtle into the moon. Learn
how to die. Eat moonshine pie. Drink wild geranium
tea. Run naked in the rain. Everything that happens
will happen and none of us will be safe from it.
Pull up anchors. Sit close to the god of night.
Lie still in a stream and breathe water. Climb to the
top of the highest tree until you come to the branch
where the blue heron sleeps. Eat poems for breakfast.
Wear them on your forehead. Lick the mountain's
bare shoulder. Measure the color of days
around your mother's death. Put your hands over
your face and listen to what they tell you. — Ellen Kort

November comes
And November goes,
With the last red berries
And the first white snows.
With night coming early,
And dawn coming late,
And ice in the bucket
And frost by the gate.
The fires burn
And the kettles sing,
And earth sinks to rest
Until next spring. — Clyde Watson

These ears aren't to be trusted.
The keening in the night, didn't you hear?
Once I believed all the stories didn't have endings,
but I realized the endings were invented, like zero,
had yet to be imagined.
The months come around again,
and we are in the same place;
full moons, cherries in bloom,
the same deer, the same frogs,
the same helpless scratching at the dirt.
You leave poems I can't read
behind on the sheets,
I try to teach you songs made of twigs and frost.
you may be imprisoned in an underwater palace;
I'll come riding to the rescue in disguise.
Leave the magic tricks to me and to the teakettle.
I've inhaled the spells of willow trees,
spat them out as blankets of white crane feathers.
Sleep easy, from behind the closet door
I'll invent our fortunes, spin them from my own skin.

(from, The Fox-Wife's Invitation) — Jeannine Hall Gailey

A pumpkin lives but once a year
when someone sets its soul afire
and on that night it stirs up fear
until its flame is snuffed.
But e'en one night of eerie light is fright enough. — Richelle E. Goodrich

Smuggling poems out of prison in the soles of mt shoes i'm way past finding salvation in the arms of a woman, I look out my window and see burning flowers and starving armies but when I look up into the night sky I see the souls of dead heroes — Raegan Butcher

Alone and lost, appeared this saint,

With pretty gray eyes, darkness can't taint.

He stole her from cold, from blustering storm,

Kind and gentle, he took her from harm.

Fearful of dark, he created her light,

A jar of gold, chasing demons of night.

Telling stories of love, he brought to her life,

A moment by his side: no pain, no strife.

He gifted her poems, a gesture on whim,

With every word read, she could see only him.

She counted the days until he returned home,

The boy with his light, the girl not alone.

Invisible to all, a shade wandering in dark,

He brought back her faith, with his pure kind heart.

- Elsie — Tillie Cole

The cherry trees are disconsolate lovers;
they can't hold their pink smiles
after the unkindness of that night.
The wind here is straight from Chicago -
it will snap you unless you bend.
The news from far-off money towns
is the clamor of falling towers.

Yet my woolly dog is happy chasing
a well-chewed stick and a wet spaniel,
a green-headed duck is talking quarks
with a brown-headed duck on the lake shore,
and my friend is reading poems of spring
in a language she knows only in dreams.
The wild cherries will bloom again. — Robert Moss

The Pleiades and northern lights are still above the mountain. The mountain is in the east, and on its slopes there are reindeer. Reindeer always remind me of trees that have taken to moving. They remind me even more of trees than people do. In the distant past, reindeer were trees as people were, but they haven't come such a long way from their origins, and the branches can be seen although they no longer bear leaves.
I have my bedtime book in my hand and my pocket light and walk toward the mountain over the edges of the moorland in rubber boots. The book is a relative of mine, I feel; it is made out of trees and human thought, and thus the relationship becomes twofold. These are ancient poems that I am taking to the mountains and the reindeer. — Gyrdir Eliasson

One night, alone in her Dogtown bed, Judy finally admitted to herself that she had been in love with Cornelius. "In love" precisely as it was described in the novels and poems she had read with Martha; love as a kind of sweet madness that colored everything. Judy had been shocked that strangers across the ocean could describe the workings of her Yankee heart: the preoccupation and yearning, the soaring happiness and keen appreciation of a man's hidden qualities, the sublime meeting of souls. And yet, there was never a mention of the sort of union she'd shared with Cornelius, the longing and fulfillment of the flesh, that could transform two bodies into one. — Anita Diamant

the sapphire depth
of my own love...startles
and warms
and wounds my soul. — Sanober Khan

To translate a poem from thinking into English takes all night. — Grace Paley

We must begin to understand the nature of intertextuality ... the manner by which texts poems and novels respond to other texts. After all, all cats may be black at night, but not to other cats. — Henry Louis Gates

a silent night. - the most eloquent poem i have ever read. — Sanober Khan

Sonnet V
I touch you as a lonely violin touches the suburbs of the faraway place
patiently the river asks for its share of the drizzle
and, bit by bit, a tomorrow passing in poems approaches
so I carry faraway's land and it carries me on travel's road
On a mare made of your virtues, my soul weaves
a natural sky made of your shadows, one chrysalis at a time.
I am the son of what you do in the earth, son of my wounds
that have lit up the pomegranate blossoms in your closed-up gardens
Out of jasmine the night's blood streams white. Your perfume,
my weakness and your secret, follows me like a snakebite. And your hair
is a tent of wind autumn in color. I walk along with speech
to the last of the words a bedouin told a pair of doves
I palpate you as a violin palpates the silk of the faraway time
and around me and you sprouts the grass of an ancient place - anew — Mahmoud Darwish

Robert Frost didn't like to explain his poems - and for good reason: to explain a poem is to suck the air from its lungs. This does not mean, however, that poets shouldn't talk about their poetry, or that one shouldn't ask questions about it. Rather, it suggests that any discussion of poetry should celebrate its ultimate ineffability and in so doing lead one to further inquiry. I think of that wonderful scene from Elie Wiesel's memoir, Night, where Mosche the Beadle of the local synagogue, in dialogue with the young, precocious author, explains: Every question possesses a power that does not lie in the answer. — Tony Leuzzi

I blaze with a deep sullen magic, smell lust like a heron on fire; all words I form into castles then storm them with soldiers of air. What I seek is not there for asking. My armies are fit and well trained. This poet will trust her battalions to fashion her words into blades. At dawn I shall ask them for beauty, for proof that their training went well. At night I shall beg their forgiveness as I cut their throats by the hill. My navies advance through the language, destroyers ablaze in high seas. I soften the island for landings. With words, I enlist a dark army. My poems are my war with the world. I blaze with a deep southern magic. The bombardiers taxi at noon. There is screaming and grief in the mansions and the moon is a heron on fire. — Pat Conroy

What is a poem then? [ ... ] I see a poem as a multicolored strip behind peeling plaster, in separate shining segments. I try to connect hands and horizons, glances and the objects imprisoned in them. That's how it is in daylight. At night [ ... ] poems are like spiriling curves that grow to completeness by themselves. The hardest thing is to hold onto them through waking into consciousness. — Stanislaw Lem

Sometimes John had recorded new compositions, or lines from his new poems. Sometimes he'd just record a busy night in The Green Man. Sometimes sheep, seals, skylarks, the wind turbine. If Liam were home there would be some Liam. The summer fair. The Fastnet Race. I would unfold my map of Clear Island. Those tapes prised the lid off homesickness and rattled out the contents, but always at the bottom was solace. — David Mitchell

[On Chopin's Preludes:]
His genius was filled with the mysterious sounds of nature, but transformed into sublime equivalents in musical thought, and not through slavish imitation of the actual external sounds. His composition of that night was surely filled with raindrops, resounding clearly on the tiles of the Charterhouse, but it had been transformed in his imagination and in his song into tears falling upon his heart from the sky ... The gift of Chopin is [the expression of] the deepest and fullest feelings and emotions that have ever existed. He made a single instrument speak a language of infinity. He could often sum up, in ten lines that a child could play, poems of a boundless exaltation, dramas of unequalled power. — George Sand

S. E. Smith's I Live in a Hut has a deceptively simple title, considering that the brain in that hut contains galaxies-worth of invention: At night when your soldiers are praying ceaselessly for less rain and more underwear my soldiers make underwear out of rain. These poems seesaw between despair and delight but delight is winning the battle. Smith is a somersaulting tightrope walker of a poet and her poems will make you look at anything and everything with new eyes: For days I tried to rub the new freckle // off my hand until I realized what it was / and began to grant it its sovereignty. — Matthea Harvey

I cast my eyes out to the sea
And gaze at all eternity.
until forever turns to night.
My eyes then lift to catch starlight. — Richelle E. Goodrich

Older boys were allowed to beat younger ones at my 15th-century English boarding school, and every boy had to run a five-mile annual steeplechase through the sludge and rain of an October day, as horses do. We wrote poems in dead languages and recited the Lord's Prayer in Latin every Sunday night. — Pico Iyer

(Page 288)
If my love were an ocean,
there would be no more land.
If my love were a desert,
you would see only sand.
If my love were a star-
late at night, only light.
And if my love could grow wings,
I'd be soaring in flight.
-I love poetry so getting to read something as tiny as this was very refreshing. I think I can relate to Hannah because what she is essentially saying is that she loves a lot to the point that if her love were an object in this world.. the entire world would be consumed by it just to show the amount of love she has. It got me confused because I found it kind of selfish of Hannah writing that poem because if she loved everone as deeply as her poems depict.. why would she leave them? — Jay Asher

This summer-sweet night is only one minute upon one minute upon another
Beautiful cacophony, sugar upon lips, dancing to exhaustion
I thought of you, before this minute upon another minute upon another
Until, numb, my lips fell onto the mouth of another, and I was undone.

~from Golden Tongue: The Poems of Steven Slaughter which is a fictional book in
Ballad: A gathering of faerie — Maggie Stiefvater

I will look at you in the darkness of the night, where there are no colours to fill my eyes and where there are no frames that would define your shape. In the silence, I will seek the warmth of the night in your memories and sleep holding tight those orphan dreams. O dear, amidst the cloudy skies, where did you disappear? — Preeth Nambiar

The night before, I'd gone overboard with my Lila poems, and maybe it's true that I was hoping that in them he'd see the genius of me, the beauty of my words in his hands. — Beth Kephart

i am like the moon--
sometimes, full.
sometimes, black.

sometimes,
forever and ever alone. — AVA.

I hope you all find yourselves sleeping with someone you love, maybe not all of the time, but a lot of the time. The touch of a foot in the night is sincere. I hope you like your work, I hope there's mystery and poetry in your life - not even poems, but patterns. I hope you can see them. Often these patterns will wake you up, and you will know that you are alive, again and again. — Eileen Myles

Neither poems nor prose just a length of rope just the wet earth
that's the way home. neither vodka nor bread just bursts of rage just more new graves
that's youth and that's love. neither sleep nor waking neither joy nor laughter just tears in the night
so the rope, paper, knife. — Tadeusz Borowski

She wrote poetry constantly; that was her "work". She was a slow bleeder and she slaved over it for long, exhausting hours, and many a middle of a night I could hear her creaking around the dead house with a pen in one hand, a clipboard and a flashlight in the other, refining her poems, jotting down the lines of a conceit. Writing never came easy for her; it gave her calluses. She never courted the muses, she wrestled them, mauled them all over the house and came up, after weeks of peripatetic labor, with a slim Spencerian sonnet, fourteen lines of imagistic jabberwocky. — Millard Kaufman

i took a night drive.
i needed to get away.
i needed to know
it's okay to go
and have no destination,
where time moves slow
or doesn't exist.
that life can be like this,
aimless wandering,
just breathing,
living,
driving forever underneath the stars. — AVA.

savor
with me
the lushness
of a lingering sleep...
and last night's
dream. — Sanober Khan

Everyone's taste is different. But I think the best way to defend against regrets after opening night is to try your best to tell the story you want to tell. In terms of smaller changes over time, I think good plays are like poems. Every syllable counts. — Stephen Karam

In the meantime, there are all my books ... "
I'd seen his books. Almost all of them had been written before his birth, which had been more than a century and a half before mine. Many of them were books of love poems. He'd tried to read to me from one of them the night before, in order to cheer me up.
It hadn't worked.
I thought it more polite to say "Thank you, John," than "Do you have any books that aren't about love? And young couples expressing that love? Because I do not need encouragement in that direction right now."
"And you have this whole castle to explore," he said, an eager light in his eyes. "The gardens are beautiful ... — Meg Cabot

Stop this day and night with me and you shall possess the origin of all poems,
You shall possess the good of the earth and sun ... there are millions of suns left,
You shall no longer take things at second or third hand ... nor look through the eyes of the dead ... nor feed on the spectres in books,
You shall not look through my eyes either, nor take things from me,
You shall listen to all sides and filter them from yourself. — Walt Whitman

Well, Thanksgiving we'll all gather at my house for dinner and we usually do Christmas at Beau's house. My mom is still feisty and kicking. She's 92. I saw her last night and she published a book at 90. It's a wonderful book called "You Caught Me Kissing" and it's basically love-poems that she wrote for my dad. It's more than that, it's a wonderful book. — Jeff Bridges

It was warm, and outside the sound of insects in the night was electric.
The music sounded better than anything I'd ever heard.
I had never been so happy in my life.
I played with the little silver medal against my bare chest.
I wrote poetry while we sat there like that in the dark and talked about our favorite poems and books and laughed and smoked. — Andrew Smith

It is my belief that the writer, the free-lance author, should be and must be a critic of the society in which he lives. ... That is all I ask of the author. To be a hero, appoint himself a moral leader, wanted or not. I believe that words count, that writing matters, that poems, essays, and novels - in the long run - make a difference. If they do not, then in the words of my exemplar Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, the writer's work is of no more importance than the barking of village dogs at night. — Edward Abbey

The time of minor poets is coming. Good-by Whitman, Dickinson, Frost. Welcome you whose fame will never reach beyond your closest family, and perhaps one or two good friends gathered after dinner over a jug of fierce red wine ... While the children are falling asleep and complaining about the noise you're making as you rummage through the closets for your old poems, afraid your wife might've thrown them out with last spring's cleaning.
It's snowing, says someone who has peeked into the dark night, and then he, too, turns toward you as you prepare yourself to read, in a manner somewhat theatrical and with a face turning red, the long rambling love poem whose final stanza (unknown to you) is hopelessly missing. — Charles Simic

Shadow of Your Spirit

At night I see the shadow of your spirit
Mixing with my blood and soul
During the day I see your photos
They tell me come to me
Come to my world and romance
Even I don't know by myself
How I fell into your love
I cannot remove it from my heart
Your love stabled my soul — Kamaran Ihsan Salih

In The Shadow Of The Night

All the clouds are gray, and the sky is dark as night. Soft words are spoken, and there's a twinkle, of a flicker of light.

The presence of a Man walks by, and Mighty and Powerful is He.
Kneeling down to pray, He says a prayer for me.

The sky becomes brighter, and the leaves of the trees turn green.
The flowers begin to bloom, and there's a warm gentle breeze.

Thank you Lord for setting me free... — Jerrel C. Thomas

Starlight beats when heart twinkles
Youthful sky beyond cloudy wrinkles
Muse of glory to flame the night
Verse inscribed as written light — Munia Khan

Too lazy to be ambitious,
I let the world take care of itself.
Ten days' worth of rice in my bag;
a bundle of twigs by the fireplace.
Why chatter about delusion and enlightenment?
Listening to the night rain on my roof,
I sit comfortably, with both legs stretched out. — Ryokan

When the glory night envelop the moon that would light up the exhilaration of heart..
the sun was reluctant to reveal smile to warm the earth..
when the fire burn until the wood becomes charcoal yield and melted into disappointment..
the earth will always embrace the rest of the wood by the fire burning in her arms..
then it's me and you in equation narrative prose deep and glorious.. — Rinto Yusnianto

One night, the Duarte girl, sang poems set to music in a voice so clear I felt my soul rise up inside my ear. In a garden of clematis, with servants dressed like Gypsies placing candles in the trees, we assembled on the grass, between a Belgian wood and {the Duchess of Lorraine}'s glassy pond. In a pale orange gown I read two pieces I'd prepared...When the ladies clapped their approval in the dark, everything, to me, was suddenly bright and near. — Danielle Dutton

In the street of the sky night walks scattering poems — E. E. Cummings

She dreamed that night of chickweed, which was a strange thing to dream about. Chickweed is a low, weedy little plant, not very distinguished. No one writes poetry comparing their lovers to chickweed (or if they do, the poems are rarely well received). — T. Kingfisher

I got the fat poet into a corner and told him he was writing shit and couldn't get away with it

Now it is night and time
for sleep. Everyone is
tired

from garbage-glutting
lifting their snouts
from the trough
long enough
to ease their gut -
I won't urge the point.

Gold-plated poems
to stuff up
their mind's ass

or politics
watered down so as
not to scare the blue bloods
Boo! you well-fed bastards — Kenneth Patchen

Every moment of the night
Forever changing places
And they put out the star-light
With the breath from their pale faces — Edgar Allan Poe

So while I drove my little and planned his fantasy night of how I was going to give Otter the key to my soul (his words, not mine), I silently panicked and wrote lines of bad poetry. Normally, I am quite adept at writing poems and lyrics to songs I'l never sing, but this stuff was just atrocious. For example:
I love you
You love me
Thank God for that
I'm so happy
And Ty's personal favorite (which he helped me on):
Otter! Otter! Otter!
Don't lead cows to slaughter
I love you and I know
I should've told you soon-a
But you didn't buy the dolphin-safe tuna!
TY asked me if I got the hidden message in his poem. I told him it was loud and clear. — T.J. Klune

Beautiful dripping fragments - the negligent list of one after another, as I happen to call them to me, or think of them,
The real poems, (what we call poems being merely pictures,)
The poems of the privacy of the night, and of men like me,
This poem, drooping shy and unseen, that I always carry, and that all men carry — Walt Whitman

The dark night was the first book of poetry and the constellations were the poems. — Chet Raymo

He shrugged. Whatever does it mean? We write poems about it all day and sing songs about it all night but if there is such a thing in real life I'm damned if I know. — Philippa Gregory

Between the Mile

I have always counted the miles.
Sometimes they came quick,
Other times slow.
The distance between things,
The way I could know.
Close could feel far,
And far could feel near.
The miles that passed too quickly,
The ones I ran out of fear.
They weren't all the same,
So I had been told,
The unmarked trails,
And the days I was bold.

Some miles went down,
Spiraling so low,
When I was afraid to look forward,
There was nowhere to go.
The sunset came fast,
And the day turned to night,
But the trails could be endless,
If I looked at them right.

Everything I knew,
All I was told,
The conversations left behind,
The people who grew old.

When the miles stretched out before me,
I wanted to sew them at the seam,
Looking forward and then back,
Holding everything in between. — Jacqueline Simon Gunn