Persian Poetry Quotes

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

With wine beside a gently flowing brook - this is the best;
Withdrawn from sorrow in some quiet nook - this is the best ~ Hafez

Maybe you are searching among the branches, for what only appears in the roots. ~ Rumi

You were born with wings, why prefer to crawl through life? ~ Rumi

I sent my Soul through the Invisible,
Some letter of that After-life to spell:
And by and by my Soul return'd to me,
And answer'd: 'I Myself am Heav'n and Hell ~ Omar Khayyam

The Angles Of The Frame
1
Many years have passed since the day,
I looked into a mirror, saw a wrinkled face.
I've been disclosed to the bulging sands of my bed.

2
Aeons of breath account for the many veins in my atrium.

3
The bull I breast-fed for many years
And I've submerged into the frame.

4
I knew the justifications were hard,
Hard as against the current of water.
No news from the ambiguous points
something uncommon.
It can't be justified by natural rules,
many years we've been tangled on it.

5
This usurped land is a part of all buried treasure islands
No finger points in any direction.
Lost in the dead-end alleys
Tracing images without a compass.

6
Horse pounding pulse sing endlessly in my blood.
My kinsmen of horses…
Blood-line linked as to rays of a circle
like roots of a tree growing deep on the roof.

7
You can't stop the hands of the clock.
You can't come back to the broken minutes.
The days have been arranged one after another.
The knights have left the game one after another.

8
There was a straw mat where you fell asleep.
I became numb, quite used to the stillness of the house.

9
Was something supposed to get away from the core
to join us?
A century has passed and we still live in this house.


10
Dimensions hav ~ Rosa Jamali

Be with those who help your being. ~ Rumi

Like A Hanged Pitcher
Like a hanged pitcher,
No drink is pouring off me
It's natural to get numbed gradually.

Pig-headed seashells!
This boasting sky,
Is an anchor
which has fallen on my lap
This dizzy sky!
The moon's been cleared
A shadow's coming after me
Barefooted on my dreams
You used to run!

Enjoyed?!
Numb!

All my veins are connected to this land...

Like a hanged pitcher
Joyful of this sky
One day a huge whale swallowed it as a whole.

And it was over!
The Gulf was over!
You waved hands.

Like a hanged pitcher,
It's simple!
I lost the game
And gambled away...

(TRANSLATED FROM ORIGINAL PERSIAN TO ENGLISH BY ROSA JAMALI) ~ Rosa Jamali

You think of yourself
as a citizen of the universe.
You think you belong
to this world of dust and matter.
Out of this dust
you have created a personal image,
and have forgotten
about the essence of your true origin ~ Rumi

Woman is the light of God. ~ Jalaluddin Rumi

The lover I am; it befits me to burn;
but what is the reason for your weeping and burning?
The candle replied: 'Oh my ill-fated lover,
a honey-sweet [shirin] friend went away from me.
Someone like Shirin has deserted me;
there is fire on my head, as it was on Farhad's.'
The candle continued, while a painful flood
each moment gushed down on his yellow cheeks:
'Pretender, this love is not your game,
as you have no patience, no strength to stand.
Untouched you shrink from a single flame,
whereas I stand still until I am consumed.
If the fire of love has scorched your wings,
look at me: it burned me from head to foot. ~ Saadi

And when you are foolish enough to identify yourself as a poet, your interlocutors will often ask: A PUBLISHED Poet? And when you tell them that you are, indeed, a published poet, they seem at least vaguely impressed. Why is that? Its not like they or anybody they know reads poetry journals. And yet there is something deeply right, I think, about this knee-jerk appeal to publicity. It's as if to say: Everybody can write a poem, but has your poetry, the distillation of your innermost being, been found authentic and intelligible by others? Can it circulate among persons, make of its readership, however small, a People in that sense? This accounts for the otherwise bafflingly persistent association of Poetry and fame - baffling since no poets are famous among the general population. To demand proof of fame is to demand proof that your songs made it back intact from the dream in the stable to the social world of the fire, that your song is at once utterly specific to you and exemplary for others. ~ Ben Lerner

May 18, 2018

Some days I could fly and feel very happy. I record those days in my journal for I know that I will feel very sad again. And I need proof that I will be very happy again. Thankfully, I feel very happy tonight. Goodnight. ~ Juansen Dizon

Poetry isn't heard with your ears it is translated from your heart listened to by your soul. ~ Richard M. Knittle Jr.

As a side note, he decided her frown would not inspire poetry. Because the poem would read: Her frown made him desire they be better strangers. ~ Cynthia Hand

There is no true poetry without conscious craft, absorbed attention, absolute concentration. There is no true poetry without unconscious invention. The reader, too, enters into the relationship between the controlled and the uncontrollable aspects of the art. Shelley says that 'Poetry redeems from decay the visitations of the divinity in man.' The poem is a genie that comes out of the bottle to liberate the reader's imagination, the divinity within. The writer and the reader make meaning together. The poet who calls on help from the heavenly muse also does so on behalf of the imaginative reader. ~ Edward Hirsch

When you find your twin flame you also find your freedom, for there is nothing more exhilarating, wild and free than absolute soul love. ~ Melody Lee

I think there is a poem out there for everyone, to be an entrance into the poetry and a relationship with it. ~ Natasha Trethewey

Life is short - while we speak it flies; enjoy, then, the present, and forget the future; such is the moral of ancient poetry, a graceful and a wise moral - indulged beneath a southern sky, and all deserving, the phrase applied to it - the philosophy of the garden. ~ Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton

There are horrible events going on all over the world. Human beings are really fucking up. Poets, we can't just write poems. We have to put poems into action. ~ Jeremiah Walton

The arts which need interpretation are the arts of time
music and poetry
and not the arts of space
sculpture and painting. ~ Salvador De Madariaga

She flooded my thoughts. I drowned in peace. ~ Faraaz Kazi

Crows are harbingers of death and omens, good and bad, according to Big Jim according to Google. Midnight-winged tricksters associated with mystery, the occult, the unknown. The netherworld, wherever it is- Portland? We make people think of the deceased and super angsty poetry. Admittedly we don't help the cause when we happily dine on fish guts in a landfill, buy hey ho. ~ Kira Jane Buxton

There is little premium in poetry in a world that thinks of Pound and Whitman as a weight and a sampler, not an Ezra, a Walt, a thing of beauty, a joy forever. ~ Anna Quindlen

Poetry and consumption are the most flattering of diseases. ~ William Shenstone

We had a moment once when I felt that we were one, in the same feeling, in the same soul. But I've come to learn that these moments can imprison us for years when they were only moments followed by many more that were not the same. ~ Najwa Zebian

I am not a mechanism, an assembly of various sections.
and it is not because the mechanism is working wrongly, that I am ill.
I am ill because of wounds to the soul, to the deep emotional self,
and the wounds to the soul take a long, long time, only time can help
and patience, and a certain difficult repentance
long difficult repentance, realization of life's mistake, and the freeing oneself
from the endless repetition of the mistake
which mankind at large has chosen to sanctify. ~ D.H. Lawrence

Perhaps there never was a monument more characteristic of an age and people than the Alhambra; a rugged fortress without, a voluptuous palace within; war frowning from its battlements; poetry breathing throughout the fairy architecture of its halls. ~ Washington Irving

I can't think of one great human being in the arts, or in history generally, who conformed, who succeeded, as educational experts tell us children must succeed, with his peer group ... If a child in their classrooms does not succeed with his peer group, then it would seem to many that both child and teacher have failed. Have they? If we ever, God forbid, manage to make each child succeed with his peer group, we will produce a race of bland and faceless nonentities, and all poetry and mystery will vanish from the face of the earth. ~ Madeleine L'Engle

I don't really feel my poems are mine at all. I didn't create them out of nothing. I owe them to my relations with other people. ~ Robert Graves

In 1971, when I was 29, I wrote my first volume of poetry. I am a poet, and I have published four books of my poems. ~ Tony Buzan

There is no poetry where there are no mistakes. ~ Joy Harjo

My soul is in a state of perpetual Autumn. ~ Nichole McElhaney

Music has a poetry of its own, and that poetry is called melody. ~ Joshua Logan

I long for the day I no longer long for him. ~ Franki Fiori

I began composing the next poem, the one that was to be written next. Not the last poem of those I had read, but the poem written in the head of someone who may never have existed but who had certainly written another poem nonetheless, and just never had the chance to commit it to ink and the page. ~ Steve Erickson

Someday the Sun will explode, and what about our journalism and poetry then? Well, so what? To hell with our exploding Sun. We have to do what we can do in the time we can act. ~ Bruce Sterling

One can speak poetry just by arranging colors well, just as one can say comforting things in music. ~ Vincent Van Gogh

in a world of chaos and ticking clocks,
live for the moments that keep you still ~ Sara Marie

Allow me to articulate this arrogance: What this poem has lost in poeticity, the whole of Philippine poetry has gained in complexity. ~ Angelo V. Suarez

Hope has no feathers
Hope takes flight
tethered with twine
like a tattered kite,
slave to the wind's
capricious drift
eager to soar
but needing lift

Hope waits stubbornly
watching the sky
for turmoil, feeding on
things that fly:
crows, ashes, newspapers,
dry leaves in flight
all suggest wind
that could lift a kite

Hope sails and plunges
firmly caught
at the end of her string -
fallen slack, pulling taught,
ragged and featherless.
Hope never flies
but doggedly watches
for windy skies. ~ Elizabeth Wein

far noh mattah wat dey say,
come wat may,
we are here to stay
inna Inglan,
inna disya time yah... ~ Linton Kwesi Johnson

Christmas poem to a man in jail
hello Bill Abbott:
I appreciate your passing around my books in
jail there, my poems and stories.
if I can lighten the load for some of those guys with
my books, fine.
but literature, you know, is difficult for the
average man to assimilate (and for the unaverage man too);
I don't like most poetry, for example,
so I write mine the way I like to read it. ~ Charles Bukowski

It's okay if I don't understand everything
or have it all figured out.
I'm not trying to save the world.
I'm just trying not to drown in it ~ Melody Lee

I dropped by your yesterday
where I found my tomorrow
There I met a living pain
and you: a dying sorrow

From the poem- My Tomorrow ~ Munia Khan

CALL YOURSELF

Look deep in the mirror
And say: 'I LOVE YOU'
And immediately
An electric current will
Ripple throughout your soul
And burst through your eyes
Like shooting stars
Dancing across the skies
In ecstasy.
To tell your soul you love it -
Is like remembering
WHO YOU ARE
After being in a coma
For a hundred years.
Your face will beam the light
Of a hundred galaxies. ~ Suzy Kassem

The window of her sadness was so vast that it almost opened a path to her soul. ~ Ondjaki

Seated at table -
no need for the fracture
of the room's silence; noiselessly
they conversed. ~ R.S. Thomas

in a split second of letting down my guard and opening up my soul, you corrupted it with this magnificent disease called 'love ~ Yefon Isabelle

When I examine my mind and try to discern clearly in the matter, I cannot satisfy myself that there are any such things as poetical ideas. No truth, it seems to me, is too precious, no observation too profound, and no sentiment too exalted to be expressed in prose. The utmost I could admit is that some ideas do, while others do not, lend themselves kindly to poetical expression; and that those receive from poetry an enhancement which glorifies and almost transfigures them, and which is not perceived to be a separate thing except by analysis. ~ A.E. Housman

Photography is an austere and blazing poetry of the real. ~ Ansel Adams

Everybody here
is infirm.
Everybody here is infirm. ~ Gwendolyn Brooks

If it doesn't feel like your heart
is either drowning or is being set on fire
then it probably isn't worth it at all.

Love is all consuming.
It is the perfect murder,
the sweetest suicide.

Let it kill you.

It's worth it, I swear. ~ Danabelle Gutierrez

Imagism was a reductio ad absurdum of one or two tendencies of romanticism, such a beautifully and finally absurd one that it is hard to believe it existed as anything but a logical construction; and what imagist found it possible to go on writing imagist poetry? A number of poets have stopped writing entirely; others, like recurring decimals, repeat the novelties they commeced with, each time less valuably than before. And there are surrealist poetry, and political poetry, and all the othe refuges of the indigent. ~ Randall Jarrell

I don't want comfortable. My heart is not a recliner. ~ Alfa Holden

Play a Death March for me ~ T. Grassan

Usually a life turned into a poem is misrepresented. ~ Mark Strand