Poems On Life Quotes & Sayings

Emily Dickinson has haunted my life - her poems, her persona, all the tales about her solitude. Ever since I discovered her in the seventh grade, I've had a crush on that spinster in white, who had such a heroic and startling inner landscape of her own. — Jerome Charyn

When I think of Robert Frost's poems, like "The Road Not Taken", I feel the support of someone who is on my side, who understands what life's choices are like, someone who says, "I've been there, and it's okay to go on". — Fred Rogers

Very early on, near the beginning of my writing life, I came to believe that I had to seize on some object outside of literature. Writing as a sylistic exercise seemed barren to me. Poetry as the art of the word made me yawn. I also understood that I couldn't sustain myself very long on the poems of others. I had to go out from myself and literature, look around in the world and lay hold of other spheres of reality. — Zbigniew Herbert

[John Clare's] father was a casual farm labourer, his family never more than a few days' wages from the poorhouse. Clare himself, from early childhood, scraped a living in the fields. He was schooled capriciously, and only until the age of 12, but from his first bare contact fell wildly in love with the written word. His early poems are remarkable not only for the way in which everything he sees flares into life, but also for his ability to pour his mingled thoughts and observations on to the page as they occur, allowing you, as perhaps no other poet has done, to watch the world from inside his head. Read The Nightingale's Nest, one of the finest poems in the English language, and you will see what I mean.
("John Clare, poet of the environmental crisis 200 years ago" in The Guardian.) — George Monbiot

My own personal task is not simply that of poet and writer (still less commentator, pseudo-prophet); it is basically to praise God out of an inner center of silence, gratitude, and 'awareness.' This can be realized in a life that apparently accomplishes nothing. Without centering on accomplishment or nonaccomplishment, my task is simply the breathing of this gratitude from day to day, in simplicity, and for the rest turning my hand to whatever comes, work being part of praise, whether splitting logs or writing poems, or best of all simple notes. — Thomas Merton

She cured me of my sadness. — Avijeet Das

For once,
engulf,
not air,
but hope.
For once,
breathe on,
a firm belief! — Jasleen Kaur Gumber

Letter to Myself, in Remission, from Myself, Terminal"

You'll come to hate your own poems,
read them as pretty wisps of colorful thinking,
all those images just a splash of colored oil
sloshed over a pool gone rancid. Admit it.
Atheists always scared you. And no wonder.
Those nights you switched on the fan so no one
could hear you scream into your pillow, weeping
and biting your own hands like a motherless
monkey,banded to a body that despised you,
a suit of coals with a jammed-shut zipper.
Instead of the truth, you took refuge in stories
and souls, wore the word survivor like a pink nimbus.
All the while, my dear, I waited, knowing
you'd catch up to me one day. I'm holding the black-
backed mirror to your face. Look into it. — Anya Krugovoy Silver

In that wounded place,
buried between
my ribs and letting go,
I miss you. — Jessica Kristie

I seek to be moved, my imagination reborn.
Let me feast on poems that feed my hunger. — Susie Clevenger

Like a speeding train
I am passing by...
I don't know
where I'm heading
with whom or why
all I know is that
I will never, ever
pass from here again
all I know is I'm skidding forward
on this track of life. — Sanober Khan

No, life cannot be understood flat on a page. It has to be lived; a person has to get out of his head, has to fall in love, has to memorize poems, has to jump off bridges into rivers, has to stand in an empty desert and whisper sonnets under his breath ... We get one story, you and I, and one story alone. God has established the elements, the setting and the climax and resolution. It would be a crime not to venture out, wouldn't it? -Donald Miller,Through Painted Deserts — Donald Miller

I will forever walk alone in a world overflowing with those that will never understand my meaning of "Learning to See" I'm always teaching myself to see beauty in all aspects of reality, yearning to learn the beauty in others, from their vision of everyday life to their deepest secrets of their dreams. As the sun rises I must smile, smile for those with the beautiful mind and soul. I'm so passionate for the visions I see, and the dreams I wish the world could be. — Michael Jones

Through windows,
in wishing wells,
whispering in the wind...
that's where I find you. — Jessica Kristie

God may reduce you on Judgment Day to tears of shame, reciting by heart the poems you would have written, had your life been good. — W. H. Auden

I bleed to un-break you,
un-mending me.
I fall to save you...
now who will save me. — Jessica Kristie

I can't love anymore.
Except for you...
I love you so much it hurts to breathe. — Jessica Kristie

You have never fought for anything in your life. You write poems and articles about slavery and the murder of Indians and hope something will change. You fight what does not come near your door, professors. You've inherited everything in your lives and do not know what it is to cry for your bread! Well, with what other expectations did I come to this country? What should I complain of? The greatest bard had no home but exile. One day to come, perhaps, I shall walk on my own shores again, one more with true friends, before I leave this earth. — Matthew Pearl

Poems and songs penned as an unstoppable outpouring of the heart take on a life of their own. They transcend the limits of nationality and time as they pass from person to person, from one heart to another. — Daisaku Ikeda

It's not Adventureland, but you write some poems, the leaves move, and you get laid sometimes. Tom Drury's Pierre Hunter on life. — Tom Drury

I want to
peel away all the labels
I had once given to others
and place them
upon the fabric
of my own identity.

They have reflected back to me,
everything that I refuse
to See in myself. — Meraaqi

As writers we intend to make a difference, to alter people's lives for the greater good ... this is why we write, to have an impact on society, to put a personal stamp on history ... Art and literature are the legacies we leave to succeeding generations. We'll be forgotten, but our books and essays, our stories and poems can survive us ... — Lee Gutkind

You are the poem
that sticks in my throat
teaching me to whisper
with the voice of my heart. — Jessica Kristie

Scent of old books a mystery; a secret port of the dreamers. — China Cancio

On hearing of the interesting events which have happened in the course of a man's experience, many people will wish that similar things had happened in their lives too, completely forgetting that they should be envious rather of the mental aptitude which lent those events the significance they possess when he describes them ; to a man of genius they were interesting adventures; but to the dull perceptions of an ordinary individual they would have been stale, everyday occurrences.
This is, in the highest degree, the case with many of Goethe's and Byron's poems, which are obviously founded upon actual facts; where it is open to a foolish reader to envy the poet because so many delightful things happened to him, instead of envying that mighty power of fantasy which was capable of turning a fairly common experience into something so great and beautiful. — Arthur Schopenhauer

Poems are invisible flowers on my skin. — Sanober Khan

When I first encountered the poems of Jon Woodward, I was stunned into the state that is my life's joy-I was in the presence of the inimitable. Uncanny Valley extends that experience-almost into another dimension. These apocalyptic, pixilated poems forge a mythology of our ravaged culture, one that might have been written in the future. If you want poetry to give you a persimmon on a plate, look elsewhere; if you want to know what happens when seven trees fall on the highway and the story is told by a stutterer, this is the book, and it could only have been written by Woodward. — Mary Ruefle

Teaching English is (as professorial jobs go) unusually labor-intensive and draining. To do it well, you have to spend a lot of time coaching students individually on their writing and thinking. Strangely enough, I still had a lot of energy for this student-oriented part of the job. Rather, it was _books_ that no longer interested me, drama and fiction in particular. It was as though a priest, in midcareer, had come to doubt the reality of transubstantiation. I could still engage with poems and expository prose, but most fiction seemed the product of extremities I no longer wished to visit. So many years of Zen training had reiterated, 'Don't get lost in the drama of life,' and here I had to stand around in a classroom defending Oedipus. — Mary Rose O'Reilley

What is this film (Mirror) about?It is about a Man. No, not the particular man whose voice we hear from behind the screen, played by Innokentiy Smoktunovsky. It's a film about you, your father, your grandfather, about someone who will live after you and who is still "you". About a Man who lives on the earth, is a part of the earth and the earth is a part of him, about the fact that a man is answerable for his life both to the past and to the future. You have to watch this film simply, and listen to the music of Bach and the poems of Arseniy Tarkovsky; watch it as one watches the stars, or the sea, as one admires a landscape. There is no mathematical logic here, for it cannot explain what man is or what is the meaning of his life. (Sculpting in Time) — Andrey Tarkovsky

Athletes take care of their bodies. Writers must similarly take care of the sensibility that houses the possibility of poems. There is nourishment in books, other art, history, philosophies - in holiness and in mirth. It is in honest hands-on labor also; I don't mean to indicate
a preference for the scholarly life. And it is in the green world - among people, and animals, and trees for that matter, if one genuinely cares about trees. — Mary Oliver

If you stuff yourself full of poems, essays, plays, stories, novels, films, comic strips, magazines, music, you automatically explode every morning like Old Faithful. I have never had a dry spell in my life, mainly because I feed myself well, to the point of bursting. I wake early and hear my morning voices leaping around in my head like jumping beans. I get out of bed to trap them before they escape. — Ray Bradbury

She is yet like a diamond on a heap of broken glass. — Mina Loy

You must be kidding." She says, "Having the power of life and death isn't enough. You
must wonder what other poems are in that book."
Hitting me as fast as a hiccup, me resting my weight on my good foot, just staring at her, I say no.
She says, "Maybe you can live forever."
And I say no.
And she says, "Maybe you can make anyone love you."
No.
And she says, "Maybe you can turn straw into gold."
And I say no and turn on my heel.
"Maybe you could bring about world peace," she says. — Chuck Palahniuk

I have been writing my whole life: stories and plays and sketches and scripts and poems and jokes. Most feel alive. And fluid. Breathing organisms made better by the people who come into contact with them. But this book has nearly killed me. Because, you see, a book? A book has a cover. They call it a jacket and that jacket keeps the inside warm so that the words stay permanent and everyone can read your genius thoughts over and over again for years to come. Once a book is published it can't be changed, which is a stressful proposition for this improviser who relies on her charm. I've been told that I am "better in the room" and "prettier in person." Both these things are not helpful when writing a book. I am looking forward to a lively book-on-tape session with the hope that Kathleen Turner agrees to play me when I talk about some of my darker periods. One can dream. — Amy Poehler

Birthing hope from the madness
that perches on the fence
of our once perfect
dreams. — Jessica Kristie

When I was a schoolgirl my safe haven was a place at the uninhabited part of my parents' house. I used to climb up to the large windowsill that was facing a spreading plum-tree in the garden. Reading books, or penning my own stories, diaries and poems, it was especially fun to rest there during the warmer seasons of the year with an open window, when the tree was all covered with tender, odorous blossom in spring, and with rich purple fruitage in summer. — Sahara Sanders

Careful.
The fall is quick,
steep,
and permanent. — Jessica Kristie

I WANT TO BE WITH SOMEONE WHO DREAMS OF DOING EVERYTHING IN LIFE
AND NOTHING ON RAINY SUNDAY AFTERNOONS. — Atticus Poetry

What a need we humans have for confession. To a priest, to a friend, to a psychoanalyst, to a relative, to an enemy, even to a torturer when there is no one else, it doesn't matter so long as we speak out what moves within us. Even the most secretive of us do it, if no more than writing in a private diary. And I have often thought as I read stories and novels and poems, especially poems, that they are no more than authors' confessions transformed by their art into something that confesses for us all. Indeed, looking back on my life-long passion for reading, the one activity that has kept me going and given me the most and only lasting pleasure, I think this is the reason that explains why it means so much to me. The books, the authors who matter the most are those who speak to me and speak for me all those things about life I most need to hear as the confession of myself. — Aidan Chambers

My way is in the sand flowing
between the shingle and the dune
the summer rain rains on my life
on me my life harrying fleeing
to its beginning to its end — Samuel Beckett

Bridge burned from end to end,
and I don't miss you anymore.
You delivered silence
I've birthed freedom. — Jessica Kristie

Steep fall to the ground
shattering
like clay pigeons
missed
by bad shots
and unsteady hands. — Jessica Kristie

Poetry is the perpetual endeavor to express the spirit of the thing, to pass the brute body and search the life and reason which causes it to exist; - to see that the object is always flowing away, whilst the spirit or necessity which causes it subsists. Its essential mark is that it betrays in every word instant activity of mind, shown in new uses of every fact and image, in preternatural quickness or perception of relations. All its words are poems. It is a presence of mind that gives a miraculous command of all means of uttering the thought and feeling of the moment. The poet squanders on the hour an amount of life that would more than furnish the seventy years of the man that stands next him. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

Now, you might think that because there are more poets than ever, there might be more opportunities for poets than ever. And you'd be correct. If your fondest wish is to become the next totally obscure minor poet on the block, well, you're probably already successful at that. This literary landscape has proven itself infinitely capable of absorbing countless interchangeable artists, all doing roughly the same thing in relative anonymity: just happily plucking away until death at the grindstone, making no great cultural headway, bouncing poems off their friends and an audience of about 40 people. A totally fine little life for an artist, to be sure. No grand expectations from the world to sit up and listen. One can live out one's days quite satisfied to create something enjoyed by a genial cult. But that's not why any of us are here tonight. We're here to conquer American Poetry and suck it dry of all glory and juice. — Jim Behrle

As the war went on, opposition grew. The American Peace Society printed a newspaper, the Advocate of Peace, which published poems, speeches, petitions, sermons against the war, and eyewitness accounts of the degradation of army life and the horrors of battle. The abolitionists, speaking through William Lloyd Garrison's Liberator, denounced the war as one "of aggression, of invasion, of conquest, and rapine - marked by ruffianism, perfidy, and every other feature of national depravity ... " Considering the strenuous efforts of the nation's leaders to build patriotic support, the amount of open dissent and criticism was remarkable. Antiwar meetings took place in spite of attacks by patriotic mobs. — Howard Zinn

I need to work on me.
The me
without you. — Jessica Kristie

There is a tender breeze
Wafting around here
Feel it from your Soul
You will see Magic over here

Did I just now hear a beautiful symphony over here ?
Or is it just your soothing words murmuring in my ear?

Is it the cute mynah bird on my shoulder?
Or is it your soft head nestling that I feel so tender?

There is a tender breeze
Wafting around here
Feel it from your Soul
You will see Magic over here...

Did I just now hear the nightingale sing around here?
Or is it the breeze whispering softly to the trees near?

Is that you giggling away to glory?
Or is that just the flowers mingling with the bees and telling their story?

There is a tender breeze
Wafting around here
Feel it from your Soul
You will see Magic over here.. — Avijeet Das

Humanity i love you because you
are perpetually putting the secret of
life in your pants and forgetting
it's there and sitting down
on it
and because you are
forever making poems in the lap
of death Humanity
i hate you — E. E. Cummings

When Love Was New

When love was new
and life was young,
and once we walked
in gracious sun,
I never dreamt of darker days,
or feared that fate had cruel ways.

When life was strong
and love was free,
and time was once
eternity -
we never planned for more or less,
nor stopped to think we should digress.

When love was young
and life was new,
and everything
was once our due,
I never doubted what I owned,
nor knew the cost was merely loaned.

Now love is tried
and life is old,
and still my feet
drag down the road -
not knowing where it all has gone,
nor how much more it still goes on.

But life grows new
and love gets old,
and this tired heart
stays off the cold -
not caring it compares with fools,
nor wise enough to fear the rules.
-Drea Damara — Drea Damara

That kind of thinking [that writers must alleviate their guilt for leading a creative life] is based on the idea that the creative life is somehow self-indulgent. Artists and writers have to understand and live the truth that what we are doing is nourishing the world. William Carlos Williams said, "It is difficult to get the news from poems yet men die miserably every day for lack of what is found there." You can't eat a book, right, but books have saved my life more often than sandwiches. And they've saved your life ... But we don't say, oh, Maya Angelou should have silenced herself because other people have other destinies. It's interesting, because artists are always encouraged to feel guilty about their work. Why? Why don't we ask predatory bankers how they alleviate their guilt? — Ariel Gore

That's why your poems can never be no more than a description of life. The page is finite. Once you put the words down on paper, you've fossilized your thought. Bugs in amber, nigger. But music is life itself. Music is time. Played live, played at seventy-eight rpms, thirty-three and a third, backwards, looped, whatever. There's no need for translation. You understand or you don't. — Paul Beatty

Sometimes in the evening when love
tunes its harp and the crickets
celebrate life, I am like a troubadour
in search of friends, loved ones,
anyone who will share with me
a bit of conversation. My loneliness
arrives ghost like and pretentious,
it seeks my soul, it is ravenous
and hurting. I admire my father
who always has advice in these matters,
but a game of chess won't do, or
the frivolity of religion.
I want to find a solution, so I
write letters, poems, and sometimes
I touch solitude on the shoulder
and surrender to a great tranquility.
I understand I need courage
and sometimes, mysteriously,
I feel whole. — Luis Omar Salinas

Don't pack out!

To some people, you make life bright
When you decide to dim your light
Their lives will be full of darkness
Do shine your light in kindness

To some people, you bring out a joy
With their emotions, never ever toy
With your smiles, grease them with oil
And make them glad when their lives boil

To other people, you are the warmth
That kills coldness and brings strength
Don't do it; don't pack out
Else, they will have blackout

You're on earth to do two things here
Wake up and do them now; this year
First, dare to grow and become better
Second, help others to also become greater

Never in any of the four seasons
Should you neglect your gifts for any reasons
The world needs you to make it a better place
Don't pack out; run your race. — Israelmore Ayivor

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

I put my faith in something unknown, beyond the moon, sun, and stars, one day I will own. I put my faith in something, renew. Beyond the rivers, deserts, mountains and valleys.One day it shall become new. I cannot renounce the struggle But yes, it's what this destiny holds The pain is worst. My heart is whole and will not burst.I live on sweet nothing.I am tired of hope, when this dream is not in the scope. I told the pope, he told me to hold on to life and use the rope.I put my faith in you, this is too good to be true. — Henry Johnson Jr

And the view was suddenly clear to me. The world opened out to its grim beyonds and I realized that, at forty, one must learn the rigors of acceptance. Capitalize it: Acceptance. I needed to accept what was put before me
be it a watery grave in Ireland's only natural fjord, or a return to the city and its grayer intensities, or a wordless exile in some steaming Cambodian swamp hole, or poems or no poems, or children or not, lovers or not, illness or otherwise, success or its absence. I would accept all that was put in my way, from here on through until I breathed my last. — Kevin Barry

You should be spreading the good word. You should be etching the good word onto the glass scanning beds of library photocopiers. You should be scraping the truth onto old auto parts and throwing them off bridges so that people digging in the mud in a million years will question the world, too. You should be carving eyeballs into tire treads and onto shoe soles so that your every trail speaks of thinking and faith and belief. You should be designing molecules that crystallize into poems of devotion. You should be making bar codes that print out truth, not lies. You shouldn't even throw away a piece of litter unless it has the truth stamped on it
a demand for people to reach a finer place!
... Your new life will be tinged with urgency, as though you're digging out the victims of an avalanche. If you're not spending every waking moment of your life living the truth, if you're not plotting every moment to boil the carcass of the old order, then you're wasting your day. — Douglas Coupland

I'd rather watch the grass grow than listen to gossip. — Lisa M. Cronkhite

I balance you
on the end of my pen.
Teetering between love
and letting go. — Jessica Kristie

Words
I ONCE HEARD A MAN SAY OR WAS IT SOMEWHERE I READ, OR MAYBE SOMETHING I WROTE A THOUSAND TIMES IN MY MIND. YOU GOT TO FIND YOUR OWN MEANING IN THIS WORLD. NO MATTER HOW MUCH YOU CHANGED, YOU STILL HAVE TO PAY THE PRICE FOR THE THINGS YOU HAVE DONE. AS I CONTINUE ON MY JOURNEY OR WHAT SOME CALL THE LONG ROAD OF LIFE I KNOW I WILL REMEMBER THAT SPECIAL YOU.
KNOWING I WILL SEE YOU FOREVER IN MY DREAMS IN THIS WORLD OR THE NEXT. — Don S. McClure

I die a little,
In the echo of your silence. — Jessica Kristie

I've never seen beauty
so devastating
as in the lines
that trace our hope
and fall from the stars. — Jessica Kristie

There lived a poet in the lands of gold,
Wrote along poems unaffected by warmth or cold,
His words spoke truth and pen's stroke was bold,
His only motive: lives to mould — Adhish Mazumder

I build boxes
and place them at your feet,
to measure the distance
between dreams and reality. — Jessica Kristie

Every mother should be a true artist, who knows how to weave into her child's life images of grace and beauty, the true poet capable of writing on the soul of childhood the harmony of love and truth, and teaching it how to produce the grandest of all poems - the poetry of a true and noble life. — Frances Ellen Watkins Harper

I find no peace, and all my war is done,
I fear and hope; I burn and freeze like ice;
I fly above the wind yet can I not arise;
And naught I have and all the world I seize on.
That looseth nor locketh holdeth me in prison,
And holdeth me not, yet can I scape nowise;
Nor letteth me live nor die at my devise,
And yet of death it giveth none occasion.
Without eyen I see, and without tongue I plain;
I desire to perish, and yet I ask health;
I love another, and thus I hate myself;
I feed me in sorrow, and laugh in all my pain.
Likewise displeaseth me both death and life
And my delight is causer of this strife. — Thomas Wyatt

The nobility of Teresa Leo's poems is that they are not disposed to hide from the dark-rather, they display a mind that tends toward obsession and brooding, that works against fatality like fingers at a knot. The firm, attentive mind on display and the lucid unfolding of the poems are the life instinct seeking and finding its way through again and again. Love and beauty are the argument, but they don't win easily. Bloom in Reverse works through elegy toward survival with moving persistence, both driven and compelling. — Tony Hoagland

As if channeling Robbe-Grillet, who strove to establish 'new relations between man and the world,' Sesshu Foster's electrifying prose poems tenderly examine then fiercely weave stark-and-broken realities into luminous dream-like narratives on the game of life. — Wanda Coleman

I'm just saying that once that have an excuse, people will do anything. They do what they are told, and they take their money and they think it's all okay because it's just their job, while their real self is what happens after work, when they're bouncing a baby on the knee, or writing poems about snowflakes or whatever. — Paul Murray

I was just an option.
Blown easily to pieces
and offered to the sky
by the sweet laced pain
upon your lips. — Jessica Kristie

I go to the shelf and pick out a few poetry books to take with me. A few old favorites and a few I haven't gotten to yet. As I slip the books into my carry-on, it occurs to me that there really are a lot of poems about death, that I've always read many poems about dying, but had almost never noticed them before. They were always the ones I lightly skimmed, and I thought that maybe I could start reading these poems more carefully. It was almost nothing, but it was also a decision about my life. — Jacob Wren

Do you know who W.H. Auden was, Mr. Iscariot? W.H. Auden was a poet who once said, "God may reduce you on Judgement Day to tears of shame reciting by heart the poems you would have written had your life been good" ... She was my poem, Mr. Iscariot. Her and the kids. But mostly her. You cashed in for silver, Mr. Iscariot. But me? Me ... I threw away gold. That's a fact. That's a natural fact. — Stephen Adly Guirgis

In her room at the prow of the house
Where light breaks,
and the windows are tossed with linden,
My daughter is writing a story.. — Wesley Banks

You can't just be reactive to the things going on in your life. You have to imagine, and you have to plunder other people's work, books, poems, ideas, observations. — David Gray

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

I require silence to write the way an apple tree requires winter to make fruit. Being with people is intimate and joyous, but at some point, I'll wander off by myself. The paradox is that what began in childhood as an act of necessary solitude has led me straight to a life with others, in which I fly to China or Lithuania or northern Minnesota to read my poems and talk with other people who love language made into a lathe on which a life can be tuned and be turned. — Jane Hirshfield

(W)hy is poetry wholly an elderly taste? When I was twenty I could not for the life of me read Shakespeare for pleasure; now it lights me as I walk to think I have two acts of King John tonight, and shall next read Richard the Second. It is poetry that I want now -- long poems. I want the concentration and the romance, and the words all glued together, fused, glowing; having no time to waste any more on prose. When I was twenty I liked Eighteenth Century prose; now it's poetry I want, so I repeat like a tipsy sailor in the front of a public house. — Virginia Woolf

On a Fine Morning
in Poems of the Past and the Present (1901)
WHENCE comes Solace?
Not from seeing
What is doing, suffering, being,
Not from noting Life's conditions,
Nor from heeding Time's monitions;
But in cleaving to the Dream,
And in gazing at the gleam
Whereby gray things golden seem.
This do I this heyday, holding
Shadows but as lights unfolding,
As no specious show this moment
With its iris-hued embowment;
But as nothing other than
Part of a benignant plan;
Proof that earth was made for man. — Thomas Hardy

And suddenly, lying in bed, I became aware of every inch of my body and I apologised to it, quietly. I apologised for bring so ungrateful for so long. Then I thanked my arms, hands and fingers for always trying so hard. I thanked my legs and feet for holding me up all the time. I thanked my brain for working so amazingly well and conjuring up thoughts and dreams and sentences and images and crazy poems. And I thanked all my organs for working together and giving me life. It had taken four and a half billion years for me to be here. Right now. In this universe. And in that moment, I felt totally overwhelmed at being alive. There could be nothing but there was everything. I didn't want to waste a single second more worrying about trivialities. Worrying that I'd never match up to an ideal that didn't even exist. Nobody is normal. We are all different. I had to make sure that every moment I had left on this planet counted. — Francesca Martinez

In fiction, the characters have their own lives. They may start as a gloss on the author's life, but they move on from there. In poetry, especially confessional poetry but in other poetry as well, the poet is not writing characters so much as emotional truth wrapped in metaphor. Bam! Pow! A shot to the gut. — Jane Yolen

Elizabeth Bishop wrote love poems, and poems about lovemaking, and one of the best poems ever written in English about the loss of love, but she had made her way through life as an orphan, a solitary. Reticence wasn't the reason she'd become a poet of the self - of a singular "mind in action," as she'd once described the effect she hoped to achieve in her poems. She had discovered early on, perhaps too early, that she was "an I . . . an Elizabeth" - and she'd treasured that painful, "unlikely" self-awareness ever since, knowing it was the same thing as her imagination. — Megan Marshall

Poems On Life:
Life is given to us,
we earn it by giving it.
Let the dead have the immortality of fame,
but the living the immortality of love.
Life's errors cry for the merciful beauty
that can modulate their isolation into a
harmony with the whole.
Life, like a child, laughs,
shaking its rattle of death as it runs. — Rabindranath Tagore

Poems On Time The butterfly counts not months but moments, and has time enough. Time is a wealth of change, but the clock in its parody makes it mere change and no wealth. Let your life lightly dance on the edges of Time like dew on the tip of a leaf. — Rabindranath Tagore

I feel your body against mine, while our lips are intertwined. — Avijeet Das

She couldn't quite see herself in it. When they were done, I read the Shakespeare sonnet that begins "Fear no more the heat o' the Sun," partly because it was appropriate to the occasion and one of the most beautiful poems in the language, but also because I hoped it might hide from my loved ones the fact that I myself had nothing to say, that while part of me was here with them on this beloved shore, another part was wandering, as it had been for months, in a barren, uninhabited landscape not unlike the one in my dream. I realized I'd felt like this for a while. Though life had gone on since my mother's death - Kate had gotten married, I'd finally published another book and gone on tour with it - some sort of internal-pause button had been pushed, allowing another part of me, one I'd specifically kept sequestered to deal with my mother, to fall silent. Since her death, Barbara and I had gone through all her things and settled her affairs, but we'd barely spoken of her. — Richard Russo

My favorite subject was English or creative writing. We did poems and making a magazine, and I did one on celebrities. I called it 'Celebrity Life Magazine.' I interviewed my good friend Kaley Cuoco. — Ashley Tisdale

The flesh covers the bone
and they put a mind
in there and
sometimes a soul,
and the women break
vases against the walls
and the men drink too
much
and nobody finds the
one
but keep
looking
crawling in and out
of beds.
flesh covers
the bone and the
flesh searches
for more than
flesh. — Charles Bukowski

Creations, whether they are children, poems, or organizations, take on a life of their own. — Starhawk

We will read books together inside the blanket and stay warm. And keep writing poetry in our respective journals. Time will fly but we will still remain inside the blanket forever. — Avijeet Das

And life goes on like this,
an uncomplete poem. — Arzum Uzun