Israelmore Poems Quotes

Don't pack out!

To some people, you make life bright
When you decide to dim your light
Their lives will be full of darkness
Do shine your light in kindness

To some people, you bring out a joy
With their emotions, never ever toy
With your smiles, grease them with oil
And make them glad when their lives boil

To other people, you are the warmth
That kills coldness and brings strength
Don't do it; don't pack out
Else, they will have blackout

You're on earth to do two things here
Wake up and do them now; this year
First, dare to grow and become better
Second, help others to also become greater

Never in any of the four seasons
Should you neglect your gifts for any reasons
The world needs you to make it a better place
Don't pack out; run your race. ~ Israelmore Ayivor

Writing is performative - and while, yes, the words in essence will be there "forever," poems are often about ecstatic moments rather than trying to pin down a particular truth of an event. ~ Denise Duhamel

One simple thing to do and destroy the spirit of self-sabotage is to admire the beauty hidden in ugly circumstances. ~ Israelmore Ayivor

Every April God rewrites the book of Genesis. ~ Austin O'Malley

First you shoot me," he muttered. "Now you're handin' me your damn club and spoutin' love poems." "She was sixteen, motherfucker, you woulda shot you." "No, asshole, I woulda killed me." At that, Preacher just kept grinning. Jesus, was he in the twilight zone? ~ Madeline Sheehan

Hard work is never a punishment. If you see it so, you may not do it with the right attitude. ~ Israelmore Ayivor

You were the poem I never knew how to write because no words could describe the wind you cannot see, but feel. ~ Shannon L. Alder

It would be worth the while to select our reading, for books are the society we keep; to read only the serenely true; never statistics, nor fiction, nor news, nor reports, nor periodicals, but only great poems, and when they failed, read them again, or perchance write more. Instead of other sacrifice, we might offer up our perfect (teleia) thoughts to the gods daily, in hymns or psalms. For we should be at the helm at least once a day. ~ Henry David Thoreau

I like to hope that Rumi's poems, even in translation, carry the essence of the transforming friendship of Rumi and Shams, that the sun can reappear, whole and radiant in any one of us at any moment. ~ Rumi

To see the Summer Sky
Is Poetry, though never in a Book it lie
True Poems flee - ~ Emily Dickinson

In almost every book I've written, there is a reference to a movie - legendary films, actors and actresses, and forgotten made-for-TV movies. The leaps poems make are not unlike the cuts in a film. The miniature and avant-garde prose poets have perhaps the most obvious ties to film, as a prose poem in its shape is not unlike a movie screen. ~ Denise Duhamel

I'm looking for you
in the bare corridor
where my shadow is the only passerby
harmonizing an unsettling whisper:
echoed through my chiming thoughts
From the poem 'Looking For You ~ Munia Khan

There is no shortage of beautiful people in this world.
What use is your beauty to me?
Your beautiful hair, your beautiful eyes
and legs? I will only speak of your beauty
if your beautiful soul shines light on it,
for I am blind to that other beauty.
What use is your hair, eyes, and legs to me
when I am the seeking the light within. ~ Kamand Kojouri

Emily Kendal Frey's The Grief Performance is a book that condenses a journey of finding and re-finding loss into beautiful packages. The packages are the poems and they sit shiny and new on every page of this fabulous and generous book. I want to go into the world that these poems create, just so that I can be given these terrifying presents again and again. I know you will, too. See you there. ~ Dorothea Lasky

The purpose of poetry is not to provide a solution or, say, to stop a war or prevent millions of people from dying, etc. Poetry can never do that. Poetry is all about keeping the dialogue alive. Poetry must bring forth, time and again, issues that need attention and are intentionally or unintentionally forgotten. ~ Abhijit Sarmah

The wild is an integral part of who we are as children. Without pausing to consider what or where or how, we gather herbs and flowers, old apples and rose hips, shiny pebbles and dead spiders, poems, tears and raindrops, putting each treasured thing into the cauldron of our souls. We stir our bucket of mud as if it were, every one, a bucket of chocolate cake to be mixed for the baking. Little witches, hag children, we dance our wildness, not afraid of not knowing.
But there comes a time when the kiss of acceptance is delayed until the mud is washed from our knees, the chocolate from our faces. Putting down our wooden spoon with a new uncertainty, setting aside our magical wand, we learn another system of values based on familiarity, on avoiding threat and rejection. We are told it is all in the nature of growing up. But it isn't so.
Walking forward and facing the shadows, stumbling on fears like litter in the alleyways of our minds, we can find the confidence again. We can let go of the clutter of our creative stagnation, abandoning the chaos of misplaced and outdated assumptions that have been our protection. Then beyond the half light and shadows, we can slip into the dark and find ourselves in a world where horizons stretch forever. Once more we can acknowledge a reality that is unlimited finding our true self, a wild spirit, free and eager to explore the extent of our potential, free to dance like fireflies, free to be the drum, free to love absolutely with ev ~ Emma Restall Orr

Most successful people move from fear to failure; to faith and then to fruitfulness. That's the trend. ~ Israelmore Ayivor

Shadow of Your Spirit

At night I see the shadow of your spirit
Mixing with my blood and soul
During the day I see your photos
They tell me come to me
Come to my world and romance
Even I don't know by myself
How I fell into your love
I cannot remove it from my heart
Your love stabled my soul ~ Kamaran Ihsan Salih

Poetry is a way for me to explore a tingly feeling, to let it play itself out, and also to map it. I feel like I'm making little star maps when I write poems. ~ Aaron Belz

When You See Millions of the Mouthless Dead"

When you see millions of the mouthless dead
Across your dreams in pale battalions go,
Say not soft things as other men have said,
That you'll remember. For you need not so.
Give them not praise. For, deaf, how should they know
It is not curses heaped on each gashed head?
Nor tears. Their blind eyes see not your tears flow.
Nor honour. It is easy to be dead.
Say only this, "They are dead." Then add thereto,
"Yet many a better one has died before."
Then, scanning all the o'ercrowded mass, should you
Perceive one face that you loved heretofore,
It is a spook. None wears the face you knew.
Great death has made all his for evermore. ~ Charles Hamilton Sorley

Flowers bloomed without glimpsing your smile in spring, leaves have fallen in autumn chiming in with the gloom, the chill of winter has gone and now is the first light of summer without you near but in our hearts will forever hold you dear ... Elizabeth's Shorter Poems ~ Elizabeth E. Castillo

You care, you dare and you share; this is the unforgettable rule of every true believer and achiever. ~ Israelmore Ayivor

Because I love narrative but am more lyrically inclined, I've learned that if I freight titles with narrative information (the who, what, when, where, why of the poem), I can get to my main interest, which is the language, and where it wants to take me. If I can establish the poem's occasion in the title, then so much the better for my freedom to associate. ~ Anna Journey

The way a love letter longs to be read
I long for you.
The way the poor Kane longs for his sled
I long for you.

The way the moon longs for the dark of night
I long for you.
The way a nestling bird longs for flight
I long for you.

I am blessed
and I am cursed.
I have waited for so long.
I need you to come to me.
And remind me
of who I was once. ~ Kamand Kojouri

She wrote love with her smile and magic with her eyes. ~ Giovannie De Sadeleer

Move what you can do at level one when you get to level one. When you get to level two, you need a bigger power to move it! ~ Israelmore Ayivor

Poems are soft kitten furs. smoothing out the rough edges of my world. ~ Sanober Khan

I should've probably warned you:
once you end a relationship with an artist,
you are perpetually reminded of them.
They have now ruined classical music and jazz for you.
They have ruined books and poetry.
You should just forget about galleries and museums.
But you know what the worst part is?
It's how they witnessed and observed you,
making you feel like the only person in the room.
And you secretly loved being looked at,
being worshipped.
So now you avoid mirrors.
Because when you look at yourself,
you remember me. ~ Kamand Kojouri

Hemingway is overrated,
Twain is even more lost at sea,
And all truths point to the mouth of a woman,
Where both her whispers and her screams,
Are born.
Pour another glass,
Beer, wine, whiskey,
I don't care,
So long as its wisdom is sharp,
And it tells lies instead of promises. ~ Dave Matthes

She couldn't quite see herself in it. When they were done, I read the Shakespeare sonnet that begins "Fear no more the heat o' the Sun," partly because it was appropriate to the occasion and one of the most beautiful poems in the language, but also because I hoped it might hide from my loved ones the fact that I myself had nothing to say, that while part of me was here with them on this beloved shore, another part was wandering, as it had been for months, in a barren, uninhabited landscape not unlike the one in my dream. I realized I'd felt like this for a while. Though life had gone on since my mother's death - Kate had gotten married, I'd finally published another book and gone on tour with it - some sort of internal-pause button had been pushed, allowing another part of me, one I'd specifically kept sequestered to deal with my mother, to fall silent. Since her death, Barbara and I had gone through all her things and settled her affairs, but we'd barely spoken of her. ~ Richard Russo

The Power of the Dog
by Rudyard Kipling


There is sorrow enough in the natural way
From men and women to fill our day;
And when we are certain of sorrow in store,
Why do we always arrange for more?
Brothers and Sisters, I bid you beware
Of giving your heart to a dog to tear.

Buy a pup and your money will buy
Love unflinching that cannot lie--
Perfect passion and worship fed
By a kick in the ribs or a pat on the head.
Nevertheless it is hardly fair
To risk your heart for a dog to tear.

When the fourteen years which Nature permits
Are closing in asthma, or tumour, or fits,
And the vet's unspoken prescription runs
To lethal chambers or loaded guns,
Then you will find--it's your own affair--
But ... you've given your heart to a dog to tear.

When the body that lived at your single will,
With its whimper of welcome, is stilled (how still!).
When the spirit that answered your every mood
Is gone--wherever it goes--for good,
You will discover how much you care,
And will give your heart to a dog to tear.

We've sorrow enough in the natural way,
When it comes to burying Christian clay.
Our loves are not given, but only lent,
At compound interest of cent per cent.
Though it is not always the case, I believe,
That the longer we've kept 'em, the more do we grieve:
~ Rudyard Kipling

you'd take one look at me and whole pieces of the earth would break off and fall away finally leaving me alone with you. ~ AVA.

If I wasn't writing poems, I'd be washing my hands all the time. ~ Sherman Alexie

The grand style is available now only in old poems, museums, and parodies. ~ Mason Cooley

I write small poems
the kind that fit on a postcard ...
and still can break your heart ~ John Geddes

Pushkin wrote Turkish poems and he was never in Turkey. ~ Ilya Ilf

Subtle salvation in poems and prose,
Hiding our heads in some shadow of home
I wasn't looking for wreaths or for bells,
Just someone to listen to stories I tell... ~ Toad The Wet Sprocket

Pessimism is too easy, even delicious, the badge and plume of intellectuals everywhere. It absolves the thinking classes of solutions. We excite ourselves with dark thoughts in plays, poems, novels, movies. ~ Ian McEwan

I will always try to turn sights and sounds into words. I will always try to shape words into my singing poems. ~ Arnold Adoff

You and I
will be
lost and found
a thousand times
along this
cobbled
road of us. ~ Atticus Poetry

I am furious at all the letters to answer, when all I want to do is think and write poems ... I long for open time, with no obligations except toward the inner world and what is going on there. ~ May Sarton

The Aryans also composed two of the world's greatest (and longest) epic poems, the Ramayana and the Mahabharata, which is eight times longer than the Iliad and Odyssey put together and three times longer than the Bible - all without the benefit of writing. These Vedic recitations, both sacred and secular, form the bedrock of Indian and Hindu culture. The ~ Arthur Herman

The notes I have made are not a diary in the ordinary sense, but partly lengthy records of my spiritual experiences, and partly poems in prose. ~ Edvard Munch

Leaders motivate people to understand that they can do better than they've already done and go farther than they've reached. ~ Israelmore Ayivor

Enemies who vow not to see you achieve it and friends who say you can't do it ... ARE THE SAME ... !!! They just don't want you to make it happen! Stay away! ~ Israelmore Ayivor