James Augustine Joyce (February 02, 1882 – January 13, 1941) Opening Paragraph of Ulysses "O and the sea the sea crimson sometimes like fire and the glorious sunsets and the fig trees in the Alameda gardens yes and all the queer little streets and pink and blue and yellow houses and the rose gardens and …
Elie Wiesel On Silence
Elie Wiesel (September 30, 1928 – July 2, 2016) I swore never to be silent whenever and wherever human beings endure suffering and humiliation. We must take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented. Jewish Holocaust 1941 — 1945
Sam Killmeyer On Inheritance
Sam Killmeyer I’ve been thinking about inheritance and what has made me who I am. Not just family inheritance, but cultural inheritance. As I follow the current news cycle, I’m thinking about how we can respond to power as poets. Art is always the first thing to be suppressed by authoritative regimes. Why? Because art …
Langston Hughes On April Rain Song
Langston Hughes (February 1, 1902 – May 22, 1967) Let the rain kiss you. Let the rain beat upon your head with silver liquid drops. Let the rain sing you a lullaby. The rain makes still pools on the sidewalk. The rain makes running pools in the gutter. The rain plays a little sleep-song on …
Paul Kane On Time Was
Paul Kane (March 23, 1950 -) Still, I must not forget that I once managed to put these things into writing. — Blanchot When the high-pitched sounds of the August continuo circulated like breezes through the immovable heat, time was a single leaf drifting upwards, then down. In the emptying out, the vacating of routine, the laboring …
May Sarton On Rinsing The Eye
May Sarton pen name of Eleanore Marie Sarton (May 3, 1912 – July 16, 1995) Between me and everything I see. The glass is pain. How to slide it away, Unblur my vision? “We must rinse the eye,” My old friend, the poet, Used to say. But that was in Belgium Many years ago. Raymond …
Rod McKuen On Absolutes
Rod McKuen (April 29, 1933 – January 29, 2015) How true is truth how absolute? If I say love do I mean loving you to the intrusion of all else and of all others? And do I know if I mean that? There are wild roses that have bloomed far into December, seemingly without a …
James Kavanaugh On There Are Men Too Gentle To Live Among Wolves
James Kavanaugh (September 17, 1928 – 29 December 2009) There are men too gentle to live among wolves Who prey upon them with IBM eyes And sell their hearts and guts for martinis at noon. There are men too gentle for a savage world Who dream instead of snow and children and Halloween And wonder …
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Jane Ebihara On The Last Kiss
A Kiss is still…an osculatory apposition of the orbicularis oris and levator labii muscles with posterior involvement of the sternocleidomastoids, commonly in a dexterous orientation. — Onur Gunturkun of Ruhr Jane Ebihara First, in your seventies and alone, you read that those who count such things say an average person kisses for a total of …
Wendell Berry On A Questionnaire
Wendell Berry (August 05, 1934 -) 1 How much poison are you willing 2 to eat for the success of the free 3 market and global trade? Please 4 name your preferred poisons. 5 For the sake of goodness, how much 6 evil are you willing to do? 7 Fill in the following blanks 8 …
Nikki Giovanni On Love
Nikki Giovanni (June 7, 1943 -) The night loves the stars as they play about the darkness … the day loves the light caressing the sun … We love … those who do … because we live in a world requiring light and darkness … partnership and solitude … sameness and difference … the familiar …
Marie Howe On Singularity
Marie Howe Do you sometimes want to wake up to the singularity we once were? so compact nobody needed a bed, or food or money — nobody hiding in the school bathroom or home alone pulling open the drawer where the pills are kept. For every atom belonging to me as good Belongs to you. Remember? …
Barbara Ras On You Can’t Have It All
Barbara Ras (1949 -) But you can have the fig tree and its fat leaves like clown hands gloved with green. You can have the touch of a single eleven-year-old finger on your cheek, waking you at one a.m. to say the hamster is back. You can have the purr of the cat and the …
Billy Collins On Forgetfulness
Billy Collins (March 22, 1941 -) The name of the author is the first to go followed obediently by the title, the plot, the heartbreaking conclusion, the entire novel which suddenly becomes one you have never read, never even heard of, as if, one by one, the memories you used to harbor decided to retire …
Robert Browning On Now
Robert Browning (May 07, 1812 – December 12, 1889) Out of your whole life give but a moment! All of your life that has gone before, All to come after it,—so you ignore, So you make perfect the present, —condense, In a rapture of rage, for perfection’s endowment, Thought and feeling and soul and sense— …
Tao Writer On The Crushing Weight Of GoodBye
Tao Writer (April 17, 1948 -) She told him what had kept her away was Death. But he rejected that excuse—for Death, he said, can never come between lovers. — Naguib Mahdouz (December 11, 1911 – August 30, 2006) I never thought the last time we said, “Good bye,” would be the last time. If I …
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Alfred Lord Tennyson On Flower In The Crannied Wall
Alfred Lord Tennyson (August 06, 1809 – October 06, 1892) Flower in the crannied wall, I pluck you out of the crannies, I hold you here, root and all, in my hand, Little flower—but if I could understand What you are, root and all, and all in all, I should know what God and man …
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Mary Oliver On Wild Geese
Mary Oliver (September 10, 1935 - January 17, 2019) You do not have to be good. You do not have to walk on your knees for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting. You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves. Tell me about despair, yours, and I …
Raymond Carver On The Hotel Del Mayo
Raymond Carver Jr. (May 25, 1938 – August 2, 1988) The girl in the lobby reading a leather-bound book. The man in the lobby using a broom. The boy in the lobby watering plants. The desk clerk looking at his nails. The woman in the lobby writing a letter. The old man in the lobby …
Mark Strand On When The Vacation Is Over For Good
Mark Strand (April 11, 1934 - November 29, 2014) It will be strange Knowing at last it couldn’t go on forever, The certain voice telling us over and over That nothing would change, And remembering too, Because by then it will all be done with, the way Things were, and how we had wasted time …
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Billy Collins On “I Love You”
Billy Collins (March 22, 1941 -) Early on, I noticed that you always say it to each of your children as you are getting off the phone with them just as you never fail to say it to me whenever we arrive at the end of a call. It’s all new to this only child. …
Nina Bogin On Initiation
Nina Bogin (January 02, 1954 -) At the crossroads, hens scratched circles into the white dust. There was a shop where I bought coffee and eggs, coarse-grained chocolate almost too sweet to eat. When I walked up the road, the string sack heavy on my arm, I thought that my legs could take me anywhere, …
Robert Graves On Flying Crooked
Robert von Ranke Graves (July 24, 1895 – December 07, 1985) The butterfly, the cabbage white, (His honest idiocy of flight) Will never now, it is too late, Master the art of flying straight, Yet has — who knows so well as I? — A just sense of how not to fly: He lurches here …
Louise Gluck On Walking At Night
Louise Gluck (April 22, 1943 -) Now that she is old, the young men don't approach her so the nights are free, the streets at dusk that were so dangerous have become as safe as the meadow. By midnight, the town's quiet. Moonlight reflects off the stone walls; on the pavement, you can hear the …
Tao Writer On Moments
Tao Writer (April 17, 1948 -) If I could master just one art, it would be the art of letting go: of people I have known and loved, of places I’ve traveled to and lived of sunsets and full moons I’ve witnessed. I would let go of this moment as quickly as it appears, faster if …
William Carlos Williams On This Is Just To Say
William Carlos Williams (September 17, 1883 – March 4, 1963) I have eaten the plums that were in the icebox and which you were probably saving for breakfast Forgive me they were delicious so sweet and so cold
Alan Lightman On Questions
Alan Lightman (November 28, 1948 -) Excerpt From Song of Two Worlds So much I’ve lost, I have nothing Except a fierce hunger To fathom this world. Naked, I knock on the door, Wearing only my questions. One thousand questions, and each gives An answer, which then forms a question. The questions and answers will …
Derek Walcott On Love After Love
Derek Walcott (January 23, 1930 - March 17, 2017) The time will come when with elation, You will greet yourself arriving at your own door, in your own mirror, and each will smile at the other’s welcome, and say, Sit here. Eat. You will love again the stranger who was your Self. Give wine. Give …
Marie Howe On Singularity
Marie Howe (1950 -) Do you sometimes want to wake up to the singularity we once were?…For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you. Remember?…before we came to believe humans were so important before this awful loneliness.
Anne Sexton On Welcome Morning
Anne Sexton (November 9, 1928 – October 4, 1974) There is joy in all: in the hair I brush each morning, in the Cannon towel, newly washed, that I rub my body with each morning, in the chapel of eggs I cook each morning, in the outcry from the kettle that heats my coffee each …
Billy Collins On Aimless Love
Billy Collins (March 22, 1941 -) This morning as I walked along the lakeshore, I fell in love with a wren and later in the day with a mouse the cat had dropped under the dining room table. In the shadows of an autumn evening, I fell for a seamstress still at her machine in …
Marge Piercy On The End Of Days
Marge Piercy (March 31, 1936 -) Almost always with cats, the end comes creeping over the two of you— she stops eating, his back legs no longer support him, she leans to your hand and purrs but cannot rise—sometimes a whimper of pain although they are stoic. They see death clearly though hooded eyes. Then …
Authur Rimbaud On My Bohemian Life
Arthur Rimbaud (October 20, 1854 – November 10, 1891) I went off with my hands in my torn coat pockets; My overcoat too was becoming ideal; I travelled beneath the sky, Muse! and I was your vassal; Oh dear me! what marvelous loves I dreamed of! My only pair of breeches had a big whole …
