Bulgarian Poetry Quotes

perhaps like me she's vainly hoping
and some news awaits,
but the moist earth already holds him
in her strong embrace... ~ Nikola Vaptsarov

Poetry is the language we speak in the most terrifying or ecstatic passages of our lives. But the very word poetry scares people. They think of their grade school teachers reciting 'Hiawatha' and they groan. ~ Erica Jong

I think it comes from really liking literary forms. Poetry is very beautiful, but the space on the page can be as affecting as where the text is. Like when Miles Davis doesn't play, it has a poignancy to it. ~ Jim Jarmusch

Poetry is what happens when nothing else can. ~ Charles Bukowski

Beauty

Void lay the world, in nothingness concealed,
Without a trace of light or life revealed,
Save one existence which second knew-
Unknown the pleasant words of We and You.
Then Beauty shone, from stranger glances free,
Seen of herself, with naught beside to see,
With garments pure of stain, the fairest flower
Of virgin loveliness in bridal bower.
No combing hand had smoothed a flowing tress,
No mirror shown her eyes their loveliness
No surma dust those cloudless orbs had known,
To the bright rose her cheek no bulbul flown.
No heightening hand had decked the rose with green,
No patch or spot upon that cheek was seen.
No zephyr from her brow had fliched a hair,
No eye in thought had seen the splendour there.
Her witching snares in solitude she laid,
And love's sweet game without a partner played.
But when bright Beauty reigns and knows her power
She springs indignant from her curtained bower.
She scorns seclusion and eludes the guard,
And from the window looks if doors be barred.
See how the tulip on the mountain grown
Soon as the breath of genial Spring has blown,
Bursts from the rock, impatient to display
Her nascent beauty to the eye of day.
When sudden to thy soul reflection brings
The precious meaning of mysterious things,
Thou canst not drive the thought from out thy brain;
Speak, hear thou must, for silence is suc ~ Nūr Ad-Dīn 'Abd Ar-Rahmān Jāmī

The one that burned the hottest is the first to die. ~ Marina Tsvetaeva

He had always thought that a Native American should have shot Robert Frost for the outrageous lie of the line "The land was ours before we were the land's." What a scandal that would be, America's best-loved geezer falling in a battle over poetry. ~ Jim Harrison

My heart is lost; the beasts have eaten it. ~ Charles Baudelaire

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

I just know,
You are going to completely lose me.
I just know,
I no longer want you to want me.
I just know,
I don't want to wait for you anymore.

I realized,
You are not someone made for me.
I understood that,
You don't deserve my love.

I just know,
You are going to completely lose me. ~ Jyoti Patel

Poetry is a kinetic arrangement of static syllables. ~ Carl Sandburg

Morning Song


A diamond of a morning
Waked me an hour too soon;
Dawn had taken in the stars
And left the faint white moon.

O white moon, you are lonely,
It is the same with me,
But we have the world to roam over,
Only the lonely are free. ~ Sara Teasdale

I never needed a Man. I needed a Viking. I needed someone who wasn't afraid of my strengths, or of my needs. I chose wrong... in the past. I thought I had to find someone who could put up with my hunger for life. But I was so damn wrong. I needed a Viking. I needed someone who would admire all the things about me that tepid men were intimidated by. ~ Alfa Holden

But Carroll's were more convoluted, and they struck me as funny in a new way:
1) Babies are illogical.
2) Nobody is despised who can manage a crocodile.
3) Illogical persons are despised.
Therefore, babies cannot manage crocodiles.
And:
1) No interesting poems are unpopular among people of real taste.
2) No modern poetry is free from affectation.
3) All of your poems are on the subject of soap bubbles.
4) No affected poetry is popular among people of taste.
5) Only a modern poem would be on the subject of soap bubbles.
Therefore, all your poems are uninteresting. ~ Steve Martin

She is the sweet fragrance,
The magic of the dusk,
The cloud in the waterfall,
The drops spilled as dew,
Rays filtering in the morning. ~ Jyoti Patel

The poems in Katherine Soniat's new collection, The Swing Girl, weave emotion's 'spray going farther than thought' with the 'bedrock things' of the trod-upon world. These poems eddy and pool in unpredictable and often surprising ways, much as the mind moves in its twilight state between waking and sleep. The fluidity of their cadence and the luminosity of their imagery carry the reader to the wellspring of poetry itself, that deep delight of which Robert Penn Warren spoke, whose source is, in Soniat's words, 'beauty on its way to being mystery.' ~ Kathryn Stripling Byer

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

Nestled... In the dappled Spring sunlight
peeking through oaks, maples, and Tulip poplar
is a country house with pale-yellow siding.
Across a corner of the weathered,
wooden-slatted front porch, a vine lazily
stretches to find a spot in the sun. ~ Christina M. Ward

Spoken word poetry is the art of performance poetry. I tell people it involves creating poetry that doesn't just want to sit on paper, that something about it demands it be heard out loud or witnessed in person. ~ Sarah Kay

The esoteric finds the Absolute within the traditions, as poets find poetry within the poems. ~ Frithjof Schuon

We have to make myths of our lives; it is the only way to live them without despair. ...The inner world, the world of poetry, is as much nourished by the bad times as by anything. ~ May Sarton

I can never get people to understand that poetry is the expression of excited passion. ~ Lord Byron

A fool lies here who tried to hustle the East. ~ Rudyard Kipling

Aubade to Langston"

When the light wakes & finds again
the music of brooms in Mexico,
when daylight pulls our hands from grief,
& hearts cleaned raw with sawdust
& saltwater flood their dazzling vessels,
when the catfish in the river
raise their eyelids towards your face,
when sweetgrass bends in waves
across battlefields where sweat
& sugar marry, when we hear our people
wearing tongues fine with plain
greeting: How You Doing, Good Morning
when I pour coffee & remember
my mother's love of buttered grits,
when the trains far away in memory
begin to turn their engines toward
a deep past of knowing,
when all I want to do is burn
my masks, when I see a woman
walking down the street holding her mind
like a leather belt, when I pluck a blues note
for my lazy shadow & cast its soul from my page,
when I see God's eyes looking up at black folks
flying between moonlight & museum,
when I see a good-looking people
who are my truest poetry,
when I pick up this pencil like a flute
& blow myself away from my death,
I listen to you again beneath the mercy
of a blue morning's grammar.

Originally published in the Southern Humanities Review, Vol. 49.3 ~ Rachel Eliza Griffiths

A book,
a book full
of human touches,
of shirts,
a book
without loneliness, with men
and tools,
a book
is victory. ~ Pablo Neruda

Well-wrought poems and works of imaginative literature can do for us what stone-cold prose can never do. They can help us grasp the full dimension of ways of life other than our own. ~ James W. Sire

He said he had an English degree, and I said, "I'm sorry to hear you're jobless." I need to network with people who encounter letters on a daily basis in math equations, not romantic poetry. ~ Jarod Kintz

Of all my seeking this is all my gain:
No agony of any mortal brain
Shall wrest the secret of the life of man;
The Search has taught me that the Search is vain. ~ Omar Khayyam

We will never get back the life we waste
trying to be normal ~ Atticus Poetry

Words

Be careful of words,
even the miraculous ones.
For the miraculous we do our best,
sometimes they swarm like insects
and leave not a sting but a kiss.
They can be as good as fingers.
They can be as trusty as the rock
you stick your bottom on.
But they can be both daisies and bruises.
Yet I am in love with words.
They are doves falling out of the ceiling.
They are six holy oranges sitting in my lap.
They are the trees, the legs of summer,
and the sun, its passionate face.
Yet often they fail me.
I have so much I want to say,
so many stories, images, proverbs, etc.
But the words aren't good enough,
the wrong ones kiss me.
Sometimes I fly like an eagle
but with the wings of a wren.
But I try to take care
and be gentle to them.
Words and eggs must be handled with care.
Once broken they are impossible
things to repair. ~ Anne Sexton

Ah, love, this is fear. This is fear and syllables
and the beginnings of beauty. ~ Robert Hass

I think I'm comfortable making myself, or my speaker, larger than life if I can then cut myself off at the ankles. The way, in "My Major Prize," the speaker does this drippy performance of sadness and poetry for some unnamed prize committee, only he lets us know that it's all a wry game. ~ Randall Mann

I fought angrily against seeing particular types of poetic organization because it seemed awful to see my own life and these actual events in that way. But when you put forth an intention into the universe to speak a certain truth and narrate a certain period of your life, you start to see the sorts of symmetries that you are not usually supposed to be able to see until you are on your deathbed and your life flashes before your eyes. And you see exactly why everything happened. And even the most painful things you've ever been through can seem unbearably beautiful. ~ Joanna Newsom

The bats inebriate the sky . . . ~ A.E. Stallings

But some nights, I must tell you,
I go down there after everyone has fallen asleep.
I swim back and forth in the echoing blackness.
I sing a love song as well as I can,
lost for a while in the home of the rain. ~ Billy Collins

Dying is a universe of its own. ~ Arlene Ang

I am sore wounded but not slain
I will lay me down and bleed a while
And then rise up to fight again ~ John Dryden