Poetry Is My Life Quotes & Sayings

Most of my life is in the past.
There goes some more of it.

I taught my sheep how to fight lions
so I would have more time — Chad Sweeney

What I would say is this: writing poems doesn't make you a poet. ... It is only with poetry, for some reason, that everyone wants to believe they can try their hand at it once in a while and be considered, can call themselves a poet. ... . It's a craft. It's an art. It's a skill. It is not therapy, and it is not compensation for terrible things in one's life. It is a thing in itself. You devote yourself to being an instrument of it, or you wander forever in the belief that it is a form of "self-expression." ... And I explained very clearly my opinion of what I think a poet, an artist is. Someone who puts this thing first. — Franz Wright

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

I walk and walk with cold hands.
Back at the house it is filled with longing,
nothing to carry longing away.
I look back over my life.
I try to find analogies.
There are none.
I have longed for people before, I have loved people before.
Not like this.
It was not this. — Anne Carson

My life is a tree, yoke fellow of the earth, pledged by roots too deep for remembrance. To stand hard against the storm. To fill my place. (But high in the branches of my green tree there is a wild bird singing. Wing-free are the wings of my bird; she hath built no mortal nest) — Karle Wilson Baker

Poetry was one of the things that interested me most as I was growing up. I used to write it in my head all the time. I still think the very greatest pleasure in life is to write a poem. — Claire Tomalin

For better or worse, poetry is my life. — Donald Hall

Yes! all is past - swift time has fled away,
Yet its swell pauses on my sickening mind;
How long will horror nerve this frame of clay?
I'm dead, and lingers yet my soul behind.
Oh! powerful Fate, revoke thy deadly spell,
And yet that may not ever, ever be,
Heaven will not smile upon the work of Hell;
Ah! no, for Heaven cannot smile on me;
Fate, envious Fate, has sealed my wayward destiny. — Percy Bysshe Shelley

It is in the more muddled moments of my life, that i become painfully aware of my issues. When nothing is going right, when life gets away from me. When i feel like life is living me, instead of me, living life. It's a difficult place be, but it's also where the seeds of change, often take root. And from those roots, a wellspring of hope and positive transformation, blooms. — Jaeda DeWalt

How long your closet held a whiff of you,
Long after hangers hung austere and bare.
I would walk in and suddenly the true
Sharp sweet sweat scent controlled the air
And life was in that small still living breath.
Where are you? since so much of you is here,
Your unique odour quite ignoring death.
My hands reach out to touch, to hold what's dear
And vital in my longing empty arms.
But other clothes fill up the space, your space,
And scent on scent send out strange false alarms.
Not of your odour there is not a trace.
But something unexpected still breaks through
The goneness to the presentness of you. — Madeleine L'Engle

I wanted to give you something that would last forever. Something that would surpass the world, that would still be alive and bright even after you passed away. Something beautiful. For your eyes and smile only. But I never found it. All I could give you is words. Words which were as fleeting as the heartbeats that shook my soul whenever you looked my way. — F.K. Preston

I don't find any direct statements in life. My poetry imitates or reproduces the way knowledge or awareness come to me, which is by fits and starts and by indirection. I don't think poetry arranged in neat patterns would reflect that situation. My poetry is disjunct, but then so is life. — John Ashbery

Ah, the freshness in the face of leaving a task undone!
To be remiss is to be positively out in the country!
What a refuge it is to be completely unreliable!
I can breathe easier now that the appointments are behind me.
I missed them all, through deliberate negligence,
Having waited for the urge to go, which I knew wouldn't come.
I'm free, and against organized, clothed society.
I'm naked and plunge into the water of my imagination.
It's too late to be at either of the two meetings where I should have been at the same time,
Deliberately at the same time ...
No matter, I'll stay here dreaming verses and smiling in italics.
This spectator aspect of life is so amusing!
I can't even light the next cigarette ... If it's an action,
It can wait for me, along with the others, in the nonmeeting called life. — Fernando Pessoa

I think can sit here for hours,
Arguing with the world as to why I can't give up,
Tell everyone around me what a blessing you are,
Laugh at all the times that you've brought sun into my life,
I can tell everyone how passionate you are and how much you bring into this world,
But right now I'm sitting here for hours,
Trying to keep myself together because I'm trying to figure out how to tell the world that the man I love,
Is the reason why I'm so broken. — Tanzy Sayadi

I begin my life. I live again. I meet a young girl called Valeria. She smiles easily. She laughs tender sounds that pull at my heart. I'm too young to be profound but she makes me feel so safe. So cherished. I am thirty years old. I bump into a woman I knew when she was a girl. Valeria looks annoyed to see me. She lives in the future. Where the world is turning. I live within the past. Where the people are trapped and screaming and alone. I live within the past when Valeria and I were in love. She's waiting for the cab to come, her foot tapping against the sidewalk. Her eyes glancing at her watch every few minutes. I'm eager to reunite our lives through some kind of friendship. I'm so eager to know her again, as she was when she was a child. But Valeria lives within the future. I live within the past. Have the two ever gotten along? Have they ever even met? — F.K. Preston

My poetry lives in the spaces of time, in between time, in time out. It is not a constant vibe; I catch it like the incoming tide, going out again. It will not let me say what I want to say for words cannot be woven together to express me that way. My words have learned to be patient for nothing. Now is my time out. — Tonny K. Brown

Do you want to see all the wrong things in our world?
You sit right there.
Then notice how many people move too fast about in life,
they go blind over the miracle of being in the moment.

Now, do you want to see all the right things?
Well I can't honestly speak for others.
But this is how it always works for me.
I just sit right here.

Right here. Beside you.

Then silently,
I notice how all the wrong things in my world
just seem to start falling
into their rightful places.

Right here. Beside you. — Frederick Espiritu

And I learned what is obvious to a child. That life is simply a collection of little lives, each lived one day at a time. That each day should be spent finding beauty in flowers and poetry and talking to animals. That a day spent with dreaming and sunsets and refreshing breezes cannot be bettered. But most of all, I learned that life is about sitting on benches next to ancient creeks with my hand on her knee and sometimes, on good days, for falling in love. — Nicholas Sparks

Love Was
Love Will Be
But Most of All,
Love is.
Life Cannot Be Without It
It is found in the Womb
In The Woods
In The Stars.
To Be or Not to Be
To Love, or not to Love
They Are Equal.
My Soul Whispers Into the Spaces.
Yes. — Cindy Martinusen Coloma

I have always made my own rules, in poetry as in life - though I have tried of late to cooperate more with my family. I do, however, believe that without order or pattern poetry is useless. — Anne Stevenson

And now the measure of my song is done:
The work has reached its end; the book is mine,
None shall unwrite these words: nor angry Jove,
Nor war, nor fire, nor flood,
Nor venomous time that eats our lives away.
Then let that morning come, as come it will,
When this disguise I carry shall be no more,
And all the treacherous years of life undone,
And yet my name shall rise to heavenly music,
The deathless music of the circling stars.
As long as Rome is the Eternal City
These lines shall echo from the lips of men,
As long as poetry speaks truth on earth,
That immortality is mine to wear. — Ovid

My life's purpose is to write poetry - but behind the poetry must be the vision of a fresh revelation for men. — William Soutar

Then there was someone else I met,
whose face and voice I can't forget,
and the memory of her
is like a jail I'm trapped inside,
or maybe she is something I just use
to hold my real life at a distance. — Tony Hoagland

Writing is my passion. Words are the way to know ecstasy. Without them life is barren. The poet insists, language is a body of suffering and when you take up language you take up the suffering too. All my life I have been suffering for words. Words have been the source of the pain and the way to heal. Struck as a child for talking, for speaking out of turn, for being out of my place. Struck as a grown woman for not knowing when to shut up, for not being willing to sacrifice words for desire. Struck by writing a book that disrupts. There are many ways to be hit. Pain is the price we pay to speak the truth. — Bell Hooks

There are times ... when we are in the midst of life-moments of confrontation with birth or death, or moments of beauty when nature or love is fully revealed, or moments of terrible loneliness-times when a holy and awesome awareness comes upon us. It may come as deep inner stillness or as a rush of overflowing emotion. It may seem to come from beyond us, without any provocation, or from within us, evoked by music or by a sleeping child. If we open our hearts at such moments, creation reveals itself to us in all it's unity and fullness. And when we return from such a moment of awareness, our hearts long to find some way to capture it in words forever, so that we can remain faithful to it's higher truth.
... When my people search for a name to give to the truth we feel at those moments, we call it God, and when we capture that understanding in timeless poetry, we call it praying. — Mary Doria Russell

I know I shouldn't be writing haiku now, so close to my death. But poetry is all I've thought of for over fifty years. When I sleep, I dream about hurrying down a road under morning clouds or evening mist. When I awaken I'm captivated by the mountain stream's interesting sounds or the calls of wild birds. Buddha called such attachment wrong, and of this I am guilty. But I cannot forget the haiku that have filled my life. — Jane Hirshfield

To whom shall I offer this book, young and sprightly,
Neat, polished, wide-margined, and finished politely?
To you, my Cornelius, whose learning pedantic,
Has dared to set forth in three volumes gigantic
The history of ages - ye gods, what a labor!
And still to enjoy the small wit of a neighbor.
A man who can be light and learned at once, sir,
By life's subtle logic is far from a dunce, sir.
So take my small book - if it meet with your favor.
The passing of years cannot dull its sweet savor. — Catullus

For me, the creation of a photograph is experienced as a heightened emotional response, most akin to poetry and music, each image the culmination of a compelling impulse I cannot deny. Whether working with a human figure or a still life, I am deeply aware of my spiritual connection with it. In my life, as in my work, I am motivated by a great yearning for balance and harmony beyond the realm of human experience, reaching for the essence of oneness with the Universe. — Ruth Bernhard

Two things consistently bring me pleasure: hot sweet tea and writing. Which is not to say that either are particularly good for me ... I use entirely too much sugar and so far don't find sucralose to be a good alternative. Also, writing is not a practice that engenders confidence. Quite the opposite. It's about making yourself deliberately insecure so that you can write the next thing and have it be worth reading.
And that's not even taking into consideration the business end of things, which can make you bitter if you're not careful ...
But I've spent my the bulk of my life to date figuring out the right mix of fat and sugar in my tea and also, how to get incrementally better (I hope ... ) at the writing, so I'm not giving it/them up! — Ariel Gordon

I moonlight as the greatest actor. I smile. I choose the comedy mask every time. I tell those who worry that I am fine, that I always will be. There is nothing to gain from these lies. I win no awards, yet I bow. On that stage I tell my life story with the lightest of words, the heaviest of hearts. I bleed for the people who stay and watch. Behold: the comedy, the tragedy. They smile and cheer. They clap for this. And I bow, and I bow, and I bow. — Elijah Noble El

To thee, to thee, my fire! Thou hast been burning in my heart all these futile years. If my life were a piece of gold it would come out of its trial brighter, but it is a trodden turf of grass, and nothing remains of it but this handful of ashes. — Rabindranath Tagore

My art is that of the 35mm kind; my poetry is of the lead and ink kind; my happiness is of the product of both; and my legacy is of the story of my soul, that my life left behind — Jeremy Aldana

I know now that the poem in my head, the one that pushed me to the page, begged me - or dared me to be born is almost never the poem that comes out. I suppose it's like anything born of/with free will and the will to live: once I've given the seed, once the juices flow through any sort of birth canal and make it to the ambient air there will, at that point, be forces that come into play that are no longer entirely mine. To forget that each word is a life unto itself is to strangle it dead before it can even take a step. — Juan-Paolo Perre

But I can't control my dreams. I can't even remember them. For all I know I'm having the time of my life when I sleep, but I just can't remember. So I'm forced to live in a life I have no control over. A life where I'm either numb to everything or terrified of every thought that crosses my mind. If this is all just a dream, then it sure is a disappointing one.

But I still have time to try and control my dreams. I have time to try and make my dreams a reality in this waking life as well. The one bloody thing I have is time. I've got to remember that. I still have time. And despite everything, there is something reassuring about that. — F.K. Preston

When I composed those verses I was preoccupied less with music than with an experience - an experience in which that beautiful musical allegory had shown its moral side, had become an awakening and a summons to a life vocation. The imperative form of the poem which specially displeases you is not the expression of a command and a will to teach but a command and warning directed towards myself. Even if you were not fully aware of this, my friend, you could have read it in the closing lines. I experienced an insight, you see, a realization and an inner vision, and wished to impress and hammer the moral of this vision into myself. That is the reason why this poem has remained in my memory. Whether the verses are good or bad they have achieved their aim, for the warning has lived on within me and has not been forgotten. It rings anew for me again to-day, and that is a wonderful little experience which your scorn cannot take away from me. — Hermann Hesse

I turn away reluctant from your light,
And stand irresolute, a mind undone,
A silly, dazzled thing deprived of sight
From having looked too long upon the sun.
Then is my daily life a narrow room
In which a little while, uncertainly,
Surrounded by impenetrable gloom,
Among familiar things grown strange to me
Making my way, I pause, and feel, and hark,
Till I become accustomed to the dark. — Edna St. Vincent Millay

Allen Ginsberg instructs: "First thought, best thought." Oh, to have my every spontaneous thought count as poetry! No draft after draft like a draft horse.
Clayton Eshleman, laughing, said, "'First thought best thought' is not 'First word best word ' Ginsberg does rewrite. I'm sure he does. — Maxine Hong Kingston

What a hypocrite I am; I spend my whole life reading books that allude to happiness, when I refuse to experience it. Sadness is an emotion you can trust. It is stronger than all of the other emotions. It makes happiness look fickle and untrustworthy. It pervades, lasts longer, and replaces the good feelings with such an eloquent ease you don't even feel the shift until you are suddenly wrapped in its chains. How hard we strive for happiness, and once we finally have the elusive feeling in our grasp, we hold it briefly, like water as it trickles through our fingers. I don't want to hold water. I want to hold something heavy and solid. Something I can understand. I understand sadness, and so I trust it. We are meant to feel sadness, if only to protect us from the brief spiels of happiness. Darkness is all I'll ever know; maybe the key is to make poetry out of it. — Tarryn Fisher

Still, what I want in my life
is to be willing
to be dazzled
to cast aside the weight of facts
and maybe even
to float a little
above this difficult world. — Mary Oliver

Living is the opposite of poetry. Poetry is the recollection of living, or, more often than not, the lament of having not lived. Or worse yet, merely the contemplation of living. My advice to you, Ms. Harper, is this: Live. And keep living. And never stop to look back to write about what you have lived and observed and overcome, lest you turn into a pillar of salt. This desert life is already full of such monoliths. — P.S. Baber

In my life are many windows
and many graves.
Sometimes they exchange
roles:
then a window is closed forever,
then by way of a gravestone
I can see
very far.
(Hebrew-to-English translation by Rabbi Steven Sager) — Yehuda Amichai

All things that are living are expression and therefore part of the inherent symbology of life. Art, therefore, that is encumbered with excessive symbolism is extraneous, and from my point of view, useless art. Anyone who understands life needs no handbook of poetry or philosophy to tell him what it is. — Marsden Hartley

Why is that I never get cut off from pity, sympathy, participation, in spite of the fact that I am living out of my own dream, my interior vision, my fantasies without any interruptions. I dream, I kiss, I have orgasms, I get exalted, I leave the world, I float, I cook, I sew, have nightmares, write in my head, compose, decompose, improvise, invent, I listen to all, I hear all that is said, I feel Spain, I am aware, I am everywhere , I am open to wounds, open to love, I am rooted to my devotions, I am never separete, I am never cut off, never blind, deaf, absent. I hold on to the dream which makes life possible, to the creation which transfigures, to the God who sustains, to the crimes which gave life, to the illusions which makes the marvelous possible. I hold on to the poetry and the human simplicities. — Anais Nin

I thought to spend my declining years writing poetry and teaching - but that won't pay the Bergdorf's bill. I think I'll move to somewhere life is cheaper. — Erica Jong

What am I to do?
What is my destiny?
I have no idea, not a clue
Feeling lost and empty.
What is my dream?
What is my future?
I beg thee to listen to me,
I beg thee to answer. — Atarah L. Poling

A Short Testament

Whatever harm I may have done
In all my life in all your wide creation
If I cannot repair it
I beg you to repair it,

And then there are all the wounded
The poor the deaf the lonely and the old
Whom I have roughly dismissed
As if I were not one of them.
Where I have wronged them by it
And cannot make amends
I ask you
To comfort them to overflowing,

And where there are lives I may have withered around me,
Or lives of strangers far or near
That I've destroyed in blind complicity,
And if I cannot find them
Or have no way to serve them,

Remember them. I beg you to remember them

When winter is over
And all your unimaginable promises
Burst into song on death's bare branches. — Anne Porter

What is that you express in your eyes? It seems to me more than all the print I have read in my life. — Walt Whitman

Through creativity, we are seamlessly connected and sustained as we pull
back the veil, revealing beneath our differences and distinctive characteristics,
human expression and the human experience are universal. It is the greatness
of this experience that connects us together by infinite invisible threads strewn
across the globe. This is my responsibility, passion and desire as an artist - my
soul purpose. — Brian Bowers

For one day as I leant over a gate that led into a field, the rhythm stopped: the rhymes and the hummings, the nonsense and the poetry. A space was cleared in my mind. I saw through the thick leaves of habit. Leaning over the gate I regretted so much litter, so much unaccomplishment and separation, for one cannot cross London to see a friend, life being so full of engagements; nor take a ship to India and see a naked man spearing a fish in blue water. I said life had been imperfect, an unfinished phrase. It had been impossible for me, taking snuff as I do from any bagman met in a train, to keep coherency - that sense of the generations, of women carrying red pitchers to the Nile, of the nightingale who sings among conquests and migrations. It had been too vast an undertaking, I said, and how can I go on lifting my foot perpetually to climb the stair? I addressed myself as one would speak to a companion with whom one is voyaging to the North Pole. — Virginia Woolf

She has a charm that is incomparable. She has a beautiful heart that flows with love. And she has a sensitive soul that enthralls with magic. She was the spark I had been waiting for all my life. — Avijeet Das

LXXV
So are you to my thoughts as food to life,
Or as sweet-season'd showers are to the ground;
And for the peace of you I hold such strife
As 'twixt a miser and his wealth is found.
Now proud as an enjoyer, and anon
Doubting the filching age will steal his treasure;
Now counting best to be with you alone,
Then better'd that the world may see my pleasure:
Sometime all full with feasting on your sight,
And by and by clean starved for a look;
Possessing or pursuing no delight
Save what is had, or must from you be took.
Thus do I pine and surfeit day by day,
Or gluttoning on all, or all away. — William Shakespeare

Often I find that poems predict what I'm going to do later in my own writing, and often I find that poems predict my life. So I think poetry is the most intense expression of feeling that we have. — Erica Jong

My life is filled with buckets of tears; thousands of people shouting in my ears; the humming and chirping of hundreds of Himalayan birds, which are irresistible to hear. — Santosh Kalwar

Borderline means you're one of those girls ...
... who walk around wearing long sleeves in the summer because you've carved up your forearms over your boyfriend. You make pathetic suicidal gestures and write bad poetry about them, listen to Ani DiFranco albums on endless repeat, end up in the emergency room for overdoses, scare off boyfriends by insisting they tell you that they love you five hundred times a day and hacking into their email to make sure they're not lying, have a police record for shoplifting, and your tooth enamel is eroded from purging. You've had five addresses and eight jobs in three years, your friends are avoiding your phone calls, you're questioning your sexuality, and the credit card companies are after you. It took a lot of years to admit that I was exactly that girl, and that the diagnostic criteria for the disorder were essentially an outline of my life. — Stacy Pershall

Alas! this is not what I thought life was.
I knew that there were crimes and evil men,
Misery and hate; nor did I hope to pass
Untouched by suffering, through the rugged glen.
In mine own heart I saw as in a glass
The hearts of others ... And when
I went among my kind, with triple brass
Of calm endurance my weak breast I armed,
To bear scorn, fear, and hate, a woeful mass! — Percy Bysshe Shelley

To exist in this poem [of creation] is a greater gift than any finite creature can imagine. To be so insignificant and yet still be given a speaking part, to be given scenes that are my own, and my own only, scenes where the audience is limited to the Author Himself (scenes that I often flub), to have been here with my frozen nose, to have been crafted with at least as much care as a snowflake (though I'm harder to melt), and to hear and feel and see and taste and smell the heavy poetry of God, that is enough. — N.D. Wilson

The experiences, the lessons, and the defeats,
They were all necessary for me to be me,
took me a while being blind before i could see,
had to crawl on my knees before i stood on my feet,
once i stood on my feet i found out i had wings,
the flight is amazing, i felt like a king,
and when no one is listening, i found out i can sing,
what happy times and thoughts does it bring,
whatever it takes just make sure you are free,
free to live, and grow like a tree,
The people you love are the branches you need,
its not about the type, the color, or breed,
Live life with ambition, ambition indeed,
Thats what it took, and thats what i need. — Michael Perez

The spirit, my love,
is stronger than laughter,
stronger than the hungry panting
of reckless lions
that paw and shuffle
underneath the canopy of bowed trees,
stronger than the pace of a dying heart,
that awaits to be pumped to life by episodes mothered by time,
by hands of mankind,
by slivers of hope
hidden in the common mind. — V.S. Atbay

The fact of the matter is that the most unexpected and miraculous thing in my life was the arrival in it of poetry itself - as a vocation and an elevation almost. — Seamus Heaney

My heart is strong,
I will not fail,
I won't be wronged,
I will prevail. — Alexandra Lanc

In a tired time, with the light outside drifting away for another day and the lights inside flickering as they come to life, I cup my hands together and prepare to give thanks ... to the life of a day given to me. A day shared with past and present, living and dying, of body and not, and a realization that in everything that is, there is something that was. — R.J. Heller

I don't want to wake up to a beautiful morning, nor I would seek my destiny in sunlit paths. The secret of life is the darkness of it, a void that would pull you deep to where you disappear into your truest self. Alas O world, little you have for an earnest heart that sings the beauty of vibrant life. — Preeth Nambiar

Writing is my soul food, sometimes I eat alone, sometimes I share the bread. — Marie H. Curran

A Paradise for you and me
Trust, true love to guide us free
Loneliness shall not fill the day
I will forever be with you
Our Love is beautiful like the sunshine lighting the way
Your gentle feel
Your caring hands
There is no doubt in your soul
No eerie place in your heart to express this feeling
Our compassion flows in the waves just to save and brighten my day My heart has no hoes Awaiting your pace
to touch this place
Our love, withstanding all odds Diminishing hate, in our thoughts There is no place I rather be til eternity... Than in your soul, life and in your dreams... I am here to stay with you forever. — Henry Johnson Jr

Song of myself
A child said What is the grass? fetching it to me with full hands;
How could I answer the child? I do not know what it is any more than he.
I guess it must be the flag of my disposition, out of hopeful green
stuff woven.
Or I guess it is the handkerchief of the Lord,
A scented gift and remembrancer designedly dropt,
Bearing the owner's name someway in the corners, that we may see
and remark, and say Whose?
Or I guess the grass is itself a child, the produced babe of the vegetation. — Walt Whitman

Pardon me, but my father says that it is a lie that Americans have everything. You have no sheep, no goats, no trees, no oil, no vines, no wine, not even chickens. He asks, 'What kind of life is that?' He says, 'No wonder you don't sing or dance or recite poetry very often. — Robert Fulghum

All lives are composed of two basic elements," the squirrel said, "purpose and poetry. By being ourselves, squirrel and raven, we fulfill the first requirement, you in flight and I in my tree. But there is poetry in the meanest of lives, and if we leave it unsought we leave ourselves unrealized. A life without food, without shelter, without love, a life lived in the rain - this is nothing beside a life without poetry. — Peter S. Beagle

In The Land of Poetry and Fighting, Efficiency rules the throne. I try to live here, so I shave my head because hair is dead and dead is inefficient. — Cameron Conaway

I care for you, darling, I love you,
the only reason I fucked L. is because you fucked
Z. and then I fucked R. and you fucked N.
and because you fucked N. I had to fuck
Y. But I think of you constantly, I feel you
here in my belly like a baby, love I'd call it,
no matter what happens I'd call it love, and so
you fucked C. and then before I could move
you fucked W., so I had to fuck D. But
I want you to know that I love you, I think of you
constantly, I don't think I've ever loved anybody
like I love you. — Charles Bukowski

I fancied my luck to be witnessing yet another full moon. True, I'd seen hundreds of full moons in my life, but they were not limitless. When one starts thinking of the full moon as a common sight that will come again to one's eyes ad-infinitum, the value of life is diminished and life goes by uncherished. 'This may be my last moon,' I sighed, feeling a sudden sweep of sorrow; and went back to reading more of The Odyssey. — Roman Payne

You do not know how much they mean to me, my friends,
And how, how rare and strange it is, to find
In a life composed so much, so much of odds and ends,
(For indeed I do not love it ... you knew? you are not blind! How keen you are!)
To find a friend who has these qualities,
Who has, and gives
Those qualities upon which friendship lives.
How much it means that I say this to you-
Without these friendships-life, what cauchemar! — T. S. Eliot

I'm interested in connecting with readers and strangers through poetry. I want to create real intimacy with my poems. Whether I do that through pulling from my personal life or using my fantasy life - or say history, whether that history is personal history or our collective histories - what's important is that an experience is created. An experience that will hopefully matter to people and feel real. I want my poems to move people and make them want to live their lives, however complicated and impossible those lives may be. I think a poem can speak to the life you currently live but also to the lives you've lived before, the ones to come and also those you've yet to imagine. What else can do that? Not sex or money or other people. — Alex Dimitrov

Poetry is what I've done my whole life. And every important thing in my life had found itself into poems. — Donald Hall

Within my reflection I see tears, for what I see is the truth, are my greatest fears. — Atarah L. Poling

Something about the turbulence of adolescence makes you want to do something creative ... I thought as I got older I would stop writing about it, but I find adolescence, and popular depictions of it, very interesting. I like to see where my own life intersects or diverges from notions of what a teenager is supposed to be, or what a black person is supposed to be, or a woman. — Allison Joseph

I grow into my death.
My life is small
and getting smaller. The world is green.
Nothing is all. — Mark Strand

Poetry alters my dna. every poem is a different life. every poem brings me closer to myself. and breaks open a new future inside of me. — Nayyirah Waheed

As I string, a swift rhythm is played out with my hands, a cadence known only to those who have strung tobacco. To many of the poor workers, the meter and rhythm of stringing tobacco is the only poetry they've ever known. — Brenda Sutton Rose

I'm not a woman you bring home to Mother, pick out china patterns with, or Mary forefend, breed. I've seen a chunk of the universe, true, but there's still so much more to see. I doubt I'll ever cure this wanderlust, and I'm content with dedicating my life to failing to sate it ... He's never going to sit at my feet and write me poems, which is good because I hate poetry, except dirty ones that rhyme. — Ann Aguirre

It is time to float on the waters of the night.
Time to wrap my arms around this book
and press it to my chest, life preserver
in a sea of unremarkable men and women,
anonymous faces on the street,
a hundred thousand unalphabetized things,
a million forgotten hours. — Billy Collins

That to the adolescent is the authentic poetic note and whoever is the first in his life to strike it, whether Tennyson, Keats, Swinburne, Housman or another, awakens a passion of imitation and an affectation which no subsequent refinement or sophistication of his taste can entirely destroy. In my own case it was Hardy in the summer of 1923; for more than a year I read no one else and I do not think that I was ever without one volume or another or the beautifully produced Wessex edition in my hands: I smuggled them into class, carried them about on Sunday walks, and took them up to the dormitory to read in the early morning, though they were far too unwieldy to be read in bed with comfort. In the autumn of 1924 there was a palace revolution after which he had to share his kingdom with Edward Thomas, until finally they were both defeated by Elliot at the battle of Oxford in 1926. — W. H. Auden

I know not whence I came,
I know not whither I go;
But the fact stands clear that I am here
In this world of pleasure and woe.
And out of the mist and murk,
Another truth shines plain.
It is in my power each day and hour
To add to its joy or its pain.
I know that the earth exists,
It is none of my business why.
I cannot find out what it's all about,
I would but waste time to try.
My life is a brief, brief thing,
I am here for a little space.
And while I stay I would like, if I may,
To brighten and better the place. — Ella Wheeler Wilcox

Some people make tunes, but it is lines that run like moving messages through my head. Whatever else I am saying and doing often has no bearing on this inner, verbal life. — Susan Hill

I had lines inside me, a string of guiding lights. I had language. Fiction and poetry are doses, medicines. What they heal is the rupture reality makes on the imagination. I had been damaged, and a very important part of me had been destroyed - that was my reality, the facts of my life. But on the other side of the facts was who I could be, how I could feel. And as long as I had words for that, images for that, stories for that, then I wasn't lost. — Jeanette Winterson

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

Medicine is my life, but literature is my mistress, and mysteries and poetry are my drugs of choice. — John A. Vanek

Some days I don't know what is greater.
My wisdom, or my stupidity. — Sanober Khan

With you a part of me hath passed away;
For in the peopled forest of my mind
A tree made leafless by this wintry wind
Shall never don again its green array.
Chapel and fireside, country road and bay,
Have something of their friendliness resigned;
Another, if I would, I could not find,
And I am grown much older in a day.
But yet I treasure in my memory
Your gift of charity, and young hearts ease,
And the dear honour of your amity;
For these once mine, my life is rich with these.
And I scarce know which part may greater be,
What I keep of you, or you rob from me. — George Santayana

Under the Walnut Tree

When I face what has left my life,
I bow. I walk outside into the cold,
rain nesting in my hair.
All the houses near me
have their lights on. Somewhere,
there is a deep listening.
I stand in the dark for a long time
under the walnut tree, unable
to tell anyone, not even the night,
what I know. I feel the darkness
rush towards me, and I open my arms. — Lynn Martin

I carry your heart with me (I carry it in my heart)I am never without it (anywhere
I go you go,my dear; and whatever is done by only me is your doing,my darling)
I fear no fate (for you are my fate,my sweet)I want no world (for beautiful you are my world,my true)
and it's you are whatever a moon has always meant and whatever a sun will always sing is you
here is the deepest secret nobody knows
(here is the root of the root and the bud of the bud and the sky of the sky of a tree called life; which grows
higher than the soul can hope or mind can hide)
and this is the wonder that's keeping the stars apart
I carry your heart (I carry it in my heart) — E. E. Cummings

I'm not really quiet or shy. Ask any of my friends! But I always ground my poetry in life itself. Poetry is an art of language, though, so I am always aware of every word's meaning, or multiple meanings. — Anne Stevenson

Courage brought me here.
I desperately tried to dress myself with words.
Yet excuses can no longer defend my walls.

So here I am.
Clueless.
Defenseless.
But I will tell you this,
for this is all you have to know.

I love you.

Nothing in this life is more worth
fighting for than that. — Frederick Espiritu

My relationship stays strong because I serenade her with my actions and I write poetry in her heart with my deeds. My endless love is expressed with more than just my words; my love is lived as a verb. — Steve Maraboli

SEA OF LIFE

This is not the end, my friend.
Just as the ocean sings songs to infinity
Our friendship too will flow onward
Until the day one of us
Turns and leaves
And the seasons will turn too
As our shells
As they return back to sand
And the tides that brought us
Forth
Will take us back
Again.

I will never leave you, my friend.
Every time you see a wave rushing to
Meet another,
Two friends unite.
Every time you see a wave crashing,
Two friends depart.
The journey will go on, my friend.
Our memories are recorded
In seashells
To show and tell
The lessons learned
In these heavens and hells
Part of this sea of life -
And when the tide is right,
We shall cross paths again
When the ocean sings our song.

Poetry by Suzy Kassem — Suzy Kassem

The Divine Comedy is a political poem and when you say poetry is not about - he's always quoted out of context, that "poetry makes nothing happen," that doesn't mean you shrug your shoulders and don't try to make anything happen. And Dante felt that poetry was engaged, there was a point of view; it's not my point of view, it's orthodox medieval Christianity, and I have my troubles with that. He didn't feel that you could just rule out so important a section of life - we care about these things, and it's out of caring about them that we write poetry. — W.S. Merwin

Four years ago the clocks started turning back. I open my eyes and see nothing. I feel nothing below or above me. I feel the absence of things. The absence of my flesh, my bones, my body, my mind. All that is left is awareness. I see nothing but the absence of colour. It's not a black darkness. It's simply nothing. The interior of a black hole. I recall news of a black hole lingering along the edges of our solar system. All that time ago. Four years ago. When the clocks started turning back. I hear nothing. Until there is a something. A small thing. A voice. I listen. There are more voices. The sounds are human. How long has it been since I've heard a human? The sounds scratch along my now present attention. They carve into my hearing. They are horrid, wretched things. Voices screaming. Growing loud and desperate. How many voices? Billions. This is the birth of our species. We are born screaming. It's all we know to do. We have screamed for eternity. Within this empty space. — F.K. Preston

Sometimes when I'm alone
I Cry,
Cause I am on my own.
The tears I cry are bitter and warm.
They flow with life but take no form
I Cry because my heart is torn.
I find it difficult to carry on.
If I had an ear to confide in,
I would cry among my treasured friend,
but who do you know that stops that long,
to help another carry on.
The world moves fast and it would rather pass by.
Then to stop and see what makes one cry,
so painful and sad.
And sometimes...
I Cry
and no one cares about why. — Tupac Shakur

For the first time in my life I saw the truth as it is set into song by so many poets, proclaimed as the final wisdom by so many thinkers. The truth - that Love is the ultimate and highest goal to which man can aspire. Then I grasped the meaning of the greatest secret that human poetry and human thought and belief have to impart: The salvation of man is through love and in love. — Viktor E. Frankl

Here's a hand to the boy who has courage
To do what he knows to be right;
When he falls in the way of temptation,
He has a hard battle to fight.
Who strives against self and his comrade
Will find a most powerful foe.
All honor to him if he conquers.
A cheer for the boy who says, "No!"

There's many a battle fought daily
The world knows nothing about;
There's many a brave little soldier
Whose strength puts a legion to rout.
And he who fights sin singlehanded
Is more of a hero, I say,
Than he who leads soldiers to battle
And conquers by arms in the fray.

Be steadfast, my boy, when you're tempted,
To do what you know to be right.
Stand firm by the colors of manhood,
And you will o'ercome in the fight.
"The right," be your battle cry ever
In waging the warfare of life,
And God, who knows who are the heroes,
Will give you the strength for the strife. — Phoebe Cary

But poetry is my life. Poetry is what matters to me. — Peter Davison