Blm Poem Quotes

Spring irises bloom.
The caged bird no longer sings -
the knee on his throat. ~ Kamand Kojouri

To do a poem justice, explain what makes it unique; to get a poem noticed, explain what makes it typical. ~ Stephen Burt

If you wish to know the truth of who you are,
follow the voice that calls you home.
Go there.
For where our love is,
there we will be. ~ Frederick Espiritu

But how wonderful when the tale is told,
And the message that is meant for us
Opens like the scents of a mountain flower! ~ Mazisi Kunene

I AM ROWING (a hex poem)

i have cursed your forehead, your belly, your life
i have cursed the streets your steps plod through
the things your hands touch
i have cursed the inside of your dreams

i have placed a puddle in your eye so that you cant see anymore
an insect in your ear so that you cant hear anymore
a sponge in your brain so that you cant understand
anymore

i have frozen you in the soul of your body
iced you in the depths of your life
the air you breathe suffocates you
the air you breathe has the air of a cellar
is an air that has already been exhaled
been puffed out by hyenas

the dung of this air is something no one can breathe
your skin is damp all over
your skin sweats out waters of great fear
your armpits reak far and wide of the crypt

animals drop dead as you pass
dogs howl at night their heads raised toward your house
you cant run away
you cant muster the strength of an ant to the tip of your feet

your fatigue makes a lead stump in your body
your fatigue is a long caravan
your fatigue stretches out to the country of nan
your fatigue is inexpressible

your mouth bites you
your nails scratch you
no longer yours, your wife
no longer yours, your brother
the sole of his foot bitten by an angry snake

someone has slobbered on your descendents
someone has droo ~ Henri Michaux

A poem is a neutrino - mainly nothing - it has no mass and can pass through the earth undetected. ~ Mary Ruefle

... And when the giant clam opened you were standing there dressed only in kelps and weeds of the ocean. And you held in your hand a starfish, and you said, 'Take, my Queen, this is for you. I bring you the stars, the stars from the borderless sea. ~ Matt Suddain

Answers
I kept my answers small and kept them near;
Big questions bruised my mind but still I let
Small answers be a bullwark to my fear.
The huge abstractions I kept from the light;
Small things I handled and caressed and loved.
I let the stars assume the whole of night.
But the big answers clamoured to be moved Into my life. Their great audacity
Shouted to be acknowledged and believed.
Even when all small answers build up to
Protection of my spirit, still I hear
Big answers striving for their overthrow.
And all the great conclusions coming near ~ Edith Sitwell

Be still my love, be still
and wait with patience
Rain will wet your skin
Be still my love, be still
and wait with insight
Wind will dry your face
Be still my love, be still
Only the sun can show you the way ~ Kristian Goldmund Aumann

Tumbling-hair
picker of buttercups
violets
dandelions
And the big bullying daisies
through the field wonderful
with eyes a little sorry
Another comes
also picking flowers ~ E. E. Cummings

I Hear that the Axe has Flowered

I hear that the axe has flowered,
I hear that the place can't be named,

I hear that the bread which looks at him
heals the hanged man,
the bread baked for him by his wife,

I hear that they call life
our only refuge. ~ Paul Celan

Sex with an ex
Is it ever really painless or just inviting stress?
I mean, really
Who does that?
Oh wait, I'm sure if they could, most everyone would ... ~ Natasha Ramsey

When you begin to read a poem you are entering a foreign country whose laws and language and life are a kind of translation of your own; but to accept it because its stews taste exactly like your old mother's hash, or to reject it because the owl-headed goddess of wisdom in its temple is fatter than the Statue of Liberty, is an equal mark of that want of imagination, that inaccessibility to experience, of which each of us who dies a natural death will die. ~ Randall Jarrell

If life is a poem, be the poet. If life is a story, be the author. If life is an adventure, be the hero. To live any other way is a waste of this experience we call life. ~ Steve Maraboli

I am a poem in progress
with no clear beginning or ending
just a middle
untended, unintended,
unfinished, hanging there
like the breath before a question ~ Jen Lynn Anderson

You want to know, companions of my youth,
How much has changed the wild but shy young poet
Forever writing last poem after last poem;
You hear he's dark as earth, barefoot,
A turban round his head, a bolo at his side,
His ballpen blown up to a long-barreled gun:
Deeper still the struggling change inside. ~ Emmanuel F. Lacaba

Oh, Man in the Moon"
"Oh, man in the moon, send an evening star to wink at my dreary eyes, and I shall make a wish for a peaceful world that spins with no more lies.
Oh, man in the moon, send the night's cool breeze to lull my leery heart, and I shall cast my fears to the wind with ease, and watch them all depart.
Oh, man in the moon, send the sandman's dust to rest my weary soul, and I shall slumber in happy dreams until the morning bells do toll. ~ Richelle E. Goodrich

Anything is a poem if you say it often enough. ~ Catherynne M Valente

Meanwhile, someplace in the world, somebody is making love and another a poem. Elsewhere in the universe, a star manyfold the mass of our third-rate sun is living out its final moments in a wild spin before collapsing into a black hole, its exhale bending spacetime itself into a well of nothingness that can swallow every atom that ever touched us and every datum we ever produced, every poem and statue and symphony we've ever known - an entropic spectacle insentient to questions of blame and mercy, devoid of why.
"In four billion years, our own star will follow its fate, collapsing into a white dwarf. We exist only by chance, after all. The Voyager will still be sailing into the interstellar shorelessness on the wings of the "heavenly breezes" Kepler had once imagined, carrying Beethoven on a golden disc crafted by a symphonic civilization that long ago made love and war and mathematics on a distant blue dot.
But until that day comes, nothing once created ever fully leaves us. Seeds are planted and come abloom generations, centuries, civilizations later, migrating across coteries and countries and continents. Meanwhile, people live and people die - in peace as war rages on, in poverty and disrepute as latent fame awaits, with much that never meets its more, in shipwrecked love.
I will die.
You will die.
The atoms that huddled for a cosmic blink around the shadow of a self will return to the seas that made us.
What will survive of us are shoreless ~ Maria Popova

Being an American in Australia isn't easy,
but I'm trying to integrate, I'm trying to fit in. ~ Billy Marshall Stoneking

If breath is as close as I can get,
tomorrow, I'll become the wind
just to be with you again. ~ Frederick Espiritu

But what interested me the most about Song of Songs was the fact that it presents us with the longest unmediated female voice in the entire Bible. Where much of the Old Testament seems to regard female sexuality as something to be regulated and feared, Song of Songs unleashes a vivid and erotic expression of woman's desire. In fact, the female perspective so dominates the poem that some scholars believe it may have been written by a woman. So what does this ancient, uninhibited female voice say? To sum it up, she says she's beautiful, and she knows what she wants. (Basically, the lyrics to Beyoncé's next hit.) ~ Rachel Held Evans

The room was the poem, the day I was in. Oh Christ. What writes my poem is the second ring, inner or outer. Poetry is just the performance of it. These little things, whether I write them or not. That's the score. The thing of great value is you. Where you are, glowing and fading, while you live. ~ Eileen Myles

There is a story that Simonides was dining at the house of a wealthy nobleman named Scopas at Crannon in Thessaly, and chanted a lyric poem which he had composed in honor of his host, in which he followed the custom of the poets by including for decorative purposes a long passage referring to Castor and Pollux; whereupon Scopas with excessive meanness told him he would pay him half the fee agreed on for the poem, and if he liked he might apply for the balance to his sons of Tyndaraus, as they had gone halves in the panegyric.

The story runs that a little later a message was brought to Simonides to go outside, as two young men were standing at the door who earnestly requested him to come out; so he rose from his seat and went out, and could not see anybody; but in the interval of his absence the roof of the hall where Scopas was giving the banquet fell in, crushing Scopas himself and his relations underneath the ruins and killing them; and when their friends wanted to bury them but were altogether unable to know them apart as they had been completely crushed, the story goes that Simonides was enabled by his recollection of the place in which each of them had been reclining at table to identify them for separate interment; and that this circumstance suggested to him the discovery of the truth that the best aid to clearness of memory consists in orderly arrangement.

He inferred that persons desiring to train this faculty must select localities and form ment ~ Marcus Tullius Cicero

When somebody discusses my work with me and peruses a poem or two, they get to see a piece of who I am. Because when it comes to poetry, I let it all spill forth. Any other way of writing prose would be a disservice to the art of poetry. ~ Nicholas Trandahl

My first spoken word poem, packed with all the wisdom of a 14-year-old, was about the injustice of being seen as unfeminine. The poem was very indignant, and mainly exaggerated, but the only spoken word poetry that I had seen up until that point was mainly indignant, so I thought that that's what was expected of me. ~ Sarah Kay

The poem finds the word that finds the feeling. ~ Jeanette Winterson

HENRY:
Leave me out of it. They don't count. Maybe Brodie got a raw deal, maybe he didn't. I don't know. It doesn't count. He's a lout with language. I can't help somebody who thinks, or thinks he thinks, that editing a newspaper is censorship, or that throwing bricks is a demonstration while building tower blocks is social violence, or that unpalatable statement is provocation while disrupting the speaker is the exercise of free speech…Words don't deserve that kind of malarkey. They're innocent, neutral, precise, standing for this, describing that, meaning the other, so if you look after them you can build bridges across incomprehension and chaos. But when they get their corners knocked off, they're no good any more, and Brodie knocks their corners off. I don't think writers are sacred, but words are. They deserve respect. If you get the right ones in the right order, you can nudge the world a little or make a poem which children will speak for you when you're dead.
Act II, Scene 5, HENRY and ANNIE ~ Tom Stoppard

The day will come
When my body no longer exists
But in the lines of this poem
I will never let you be alone
The day will come
When my voice is no longer heard
But within the words of this poem
I will continue to watch over you
The day will come
When my dreams are no longer known
But in the spaces found in the letters of this poem
I will never tired of looking for you ~ Sapardi Djoko Damono

Remember
I gave you life

even if you are

nothing
but a poem

be it tiny

you occupy a
place

of the world. ~ Colin Andersen

In a funny way, poems are suited to modern life. They're short, they're intense. Nobody has time to read a 700-page book. People read magazines, and a poem takes less time than an article. ~ Caroline Kennedy

The moon shining high
Listening to their story
Without a sigh

They scaled the peaks
Imprinting their names
In time and space

In their love
The rainbow curved in delight ~ Jyoti Patel

Distance looks our way; the godwits vanish towards another summer and none knows where he will lie down at night. ~ Janet Frame's Rewording Of A Charles Brasch Poem

In the original novel [ Anthem], the story unfolds in the mind of a single character. Maybe that's why Ayn Rand called the work a poem. ~ Jeff Britting

The entire routine of our memorized acquisitions is a consequence of nothing but the Law of Contiguity. The words of a poem, the formulas of trigonometry, the facts of history, the properties of material things, are all known to us as definite systems or groups of objects which cohere in an order fixed by innumerable iterations, and of which any one part reminds us of the others. ~ William James