Irish Poem Quotes

These are the ashes of fiery weather,
Of nights full of the green stars from Ireland,
Wet out of the sea, and luminously wet,
Like beautiful and abandonded refugees. ~ Wallace Stevens

Morning and evening
Maids heard the goblins cry:
'Come buy our orchard fruits,
Come buy, come buy ~ Christina Rossetti

you said,
"your bones belong in museums"
i said,
"when you kiss me,
fireworks electrocute my spine"
my mother is dying and doesn't play piano anymore,
i tell my mailman about how he should try pecan pie,
when at the supermarket, i always forget about eggs,

i've started collecting paintings,
i go to little art shows all around New York City
and introduce myself as "Rose"
when strange boys stare at my lips, i kiss
them,
i chew poetry and forget to leave tips,
i order wine and leave flowers at graveyards
that don't have any,
when my father calls, i do not answer

everything you say reminds me of brown tangerines,
i want to spill this poem inside of you

i work as a stewardess and the first thing they
teach you is how to respond when someone asks
you to take off your underwear

i wish i could say "sure thing fella, let me wrap it
around your throat until you turn purple"

but instead it's "if there's anything else, please let me
know"

and so when you called, the only thing i could say was
if there's anything else,
please let me
know ~ Irynka

A poem by Margot Bickel

A little peace
within the last hours of the almost bygone day
a little silence
between the days
so that the nascent yesterday does not get in the past
and tomorrow is lived for today ~ Margot Bickel

For some reason there's this myth that creativity - [especially] in terms of creative writing - is a gift you either have, or you don't. So when people first start writing, if they write something that's not very good, or if they try and it's difficult, they go, "Oh, I guess I don't have it." That doesn't seem very fair, you have to try and you have to work at it. If we get scared of one bad poem and quit, that's not doing anybody any good. ~ Sarah Kay

My parents are Irish, my grandparents are Irish, my great-grandparents are Irish. I was born in England; my blood is Irish. ~ Brian McDermott

But if she doesn't
learn nostalgia now, how will I ever teach her
regret? I have to get her ready for the future. ~ Keetje Kuipers

Irish as a Paddy's pig. ~ Eugene O'Neill

Ultimately, we will lose each other
to something. I would hope for grand
circumstance - death or disaster.
But it might not be that way at all.
It might be that you walk out
one morning after making love
to buy cigarettes, and never return,
or I fall in love with another …
It might be a slow drift into indifference.
Either way, we'll have to learn
to bear the weight of the eventuality
that we will lose each other to something.
So why not begin now, while your head
rests like a perfect moon in my lap …?
Why not reach for the seam in this …
night and tear it, just a little, so the falling
can begin? Because later, when we cross
each other on the streets, and are forced
to look away, when we've thrown
the disregarded pieces of our togetherness
into bedroom drawers and the smell
of our bodies is disappearing like the sweet
decay of lilies - what will we call it,
when it's no longer love? ~ Tishani Doshi

If Irish or Italian culture dies in America it really isn't that big a deal. They will still exist in Italy and Ireland. Not so with us. There is no other place. North America is our old country. ~ Janet Campbell Hale

The door of the novel, like the door of the poem, also shuts. But not so fast, nor with such manic, unanswerable finality. ~ Sylvia Plath

But I am wise if not yet quite old, wanting the poem more than the lover, wanting words more than the sticky dew men secrete in their private places. ~ Erica Jong

Even if you're a poet sitting in your room writing a poem, you're still in the world - although I guess being a poet is a different than having to deal with 40 or 50 people to raise a couple million bucks and all that bullshit. ~ Abel Ferrara

The historian is an indissoluble part of his history, as the poet is of his poem, as the shadowy biographer is of his subject's life ... ~ A.S. Byatt

From the beginning I felt that I didn't ever want to leave the impression that the process of writing a poem is totally mysterious. I couldn't explain everything that went on in the creation of a poem, but I could try to explain as much as I knew. I thought readers deserved that. I didn't want to set myself apart as being someone special. ~ Pattiann Rogers

Stop blaming people for not helping you. No matter how your teacher teaches you to recite a poem, you can't wear her smiling face to the platform. You've got to put that smile on your own face. ~ Israelmore Ayivor

And treating poetry as a performing art emphasizes its ephemerality. A printed poem can be endlessly reprinted, photocopied, scanned, uploaded, cut and pasted - but a performance, even if somebody's there with a video camera, is one time only: the audience experiences something that won't exist when the performance is over, and which won't ever be reproduced in exactly the same form. I find that appealing. ~ James Arthur

I'll tell you something. Once I was very fond of a poem by Emily Dickinson or somebody. I only remember one line of it, but it goes, 'The soul selects her own society.' I used to tell it to everybody. Once I quoted it to a friend of mine, and he said, 'Maybe, but the body gets thrown into bed with the goddamnedest people. ~ Peter S. Beagle

My first novel was turned down by about twenty publishers over a period of two and a half years. Because my name is Irish and would not be familiar to English editors, one of them said: 'If she writes anything else, do let us know.' Slowly, very slowly, the books began to sell and be noticed. ~ Colm Toibin

Peace in my mind,
Peace in my heart,
Peace in my dreams
And peace in my thoughts. ~ Debasish Mridha

love ridden
i searched for you
in corridors,
open doors
and in endless seas
of similes
and metaphors
but we never were
on the same page. ~ K.Y. Robinson

'Love' is so short of perfect rhymes that convention allows half-rhymes like 'move.' The alternative is a plague of doves, or a kind of poem in which the poet addresses his adored both as 'love' and as 'guv' - a perfectly decent solution once, but only once, in a while. ~ James Fenton

It is through poetry that we give name to those ideas which are-until the poem-nameless and formless, about to be birthed, but already felt. ~ Audre Lorde

this is not a Quote it's a poem.
"A Thousand Kisses Deep"

The ponies run, the girls are young,
The odds are there to beat.
You win a while, and then it's done –
Your little winning streak.
And summoned now to deal
With your invincible defeat,
You live your life as if it's real,
A Thousand Kisses Deep.

I'm turning tricks, I'm getting fixed,
I'm back on Boogie Street.
You lose your grip, and then you slip
Into the Masterpiece.
And maybe I had miles to drive,
And promises to keep:
You ditch it all to stay alive,
A Thousand Kisses Deep.

And sometimes when the night is slow,
The wretched and the meek,
We gather up our hearts and go,
A Thousand Kisses Deep.

Confined to sex, we pressed against
The limits of the sea:
I saw there were no oceans left
For scavengers like me.
I made it to the forward deck.
I blessed our remnant fleet –
And then consented to be wrecked,
A Thousand Kisses Deep.

I'm turning tricks, I'm getting fixed,
I'm back on Boogie Street.
I guess they won't exchange the gifts
That you were meant to keep.
And quiet is the thought of you,
The file on you complete,
Except what we forgot to do,
A Thousand Kisses Deep.

And sometimes when the night is slow,
The wretched and the meek,
We gather up our hearts and go,
A Thousand Kisses Deep ~ Leonard Cohen

You want the secret off my succes; my recipe? I have always brought the same care to making an adventure novel, a serialized novel, that others would bring to the making of a poem. My ambition was to raise the level of this much maligned genre. ~ Gaston Leroux

And blessed be the first sweet suffering that I felt in being conjoined with love and the bow and the shafts with which I was pierced, and the wounds that run to the depths of my heart ... any man who loves this poem as I do, must be my master ... And any man who feels as I do about these words must be my drinking companion. ~ Salman Rushdie

Your soul: pure glucose edged with hints
Of tentative and half-soiled tints ~ Edith Sitwell

There is a spell for almost anything and if there's not a spell, there is at least a poem. ~ Nikita Gill

I'm looking for you
into that silver
spoon where I taste my reflection
to feel the touch of your untouchables
- from the poem Looking For You ~ Munia Khan

If that voice that you created that is most alive in the poem isn't carried throughout the whole poem, then I destroy where it's not there, and I reconstruct it so that that voice is the dominant voice in the poem. ~ Philip Levine

The writing style which is most natural for you is bound to echo the speech you heard when a child. English was the novelist Joseph Conrad's third language, and much of that seems piquant in his use of English was no doubt colored by his first language, which was Polish. And lucky indeed is the writer who has grown up in Ireland, for the English spoken there is so amusing and musical. I myself grew up in Indianapolis, where common speech sounds like a band saw cutting galvanized tin, and employs a vocabulary as unornamental as a monkey wrench.

In some of the more remote hollows of Appalachia, children still grow up hearing songs and locutions of Elizabethan times. Yes, and many Americans grow up hearing a language other than English, or an English dialect a majority of Americans cannot understand.

All these varieties of speech are beautiful, just as the varieties of butterflies are beautiful. No matter what your first language, you should treasure it all your life. If it happens not to be standard English, and if it shows itself when you write standard English, the result is usually delightful, like a very pretty girl with one eye that is green and one that is blue.

I myself find that I trust my own writing most, and others seem to trust it most, too, when I sound most like a person from Indianapolis, which is what I am. What alternatives do I have? The one most vehemently recommended by teachers has no doubt been pressed on you, as well: to w ~ Kurt Vonnegut Jr.