Poetry Lyrics Quotes

I sung that I knew you before
The time I saw your face
The green eternity in your eyes
Made time feel misplaced
Your dress was the color of wine
And I was drunk off the taste
I sang my heart into the night
I knew you felt the same way ~ Eric Overby

To say more while saying less is the secret of being simple. ~ Dejan Stojanovic

It seems to me / the the great bards of the 20th century are in Publicity / those Keatses and Shelleys singing the Colgate smile / Cosmic Coca-Cola, the pause the refreshes, / the make of car that will take us to the land of happiness. ~ Ernesto Cardenal

In English sometimes they call a mentally disabled person a retard, and there is a kind of accidental poetry in naming a human being with this quality of latency or absence, like a clock left behind in an empty room, a page someone forgot to rip out of a calendar, the walking embodiment of jet lag. ~ Jean-Christophe Valtat

Poetry should be vital
either stirring our blood by its divine movements or snatching our breath by its divine perfection. To do both is supreme glory, to do either is enduring fame. ~ Augustine Birrell

Chapter One: The Dawn and the Dread

Heartbeat, heartbeat comes from Valhallan way,
To meet down in judgment, to ply its trade.
Two →swords← to join in worthy cross,
Actions to be rendered, one to be lost.

She did come now from 'yond northern slope,
A day of reckoning did she again once hope.
A devout meeting was her qwesterly bane,
To stay her hand was to go insane.

St. Kari of the Blade to meet her past,
A wicked enemy, peerless of match.
Rode Kari she her charger on down,
Past the Dead Land where Gaul sat crowned.

A killing job, yea, she desired to lastly kill,
To set things right so her heart might lie still.
Upon the mist and roaring plain,
She entered in, a soul uncontained.

A fierce wind in deed, and forever freed,
Enemies she annihilhates ('tis hur' creed).
Her own advanced guard of a sort,
Multitudes to follow in her report.

Know this Valkyrie from on cold,
An ancient maiden soft and bold.
A warrior spirit from Ages past,
A fragmented mind like broken glass.

Solid in stature this eternal framed being,
Yet crippled within from internaled bleedings.
A sword saint so refined in the poetic art,
A noble character yet with a banshee's heart.

Rhythmed horse now to the beats,
Kari emboldened amid the sleet.
Beyond the mountain she does come,
Unto southern fields wherein r ~ Douglas Laurent

Love is a clash of lightnings ~ Pablo Neruda

Tell me, you people out there, what is poetry anyway?
Can anyone die without even a little? ~ Mark Strand

We're almost a whole shadow now from far away. ~ Emily Skaja

How can
someone
be
too young
to be
in love
when we were
crafted
from
ocean waves
& starlight?
-young love ~ Amanda Lovelace

I am back in my beloved city. The scene of desolation fills my eyes with tears. At every step my distress and agitation increases. I cannot recognize houses or landmarks I once knew well. Of the former inhabitants, there is no trace. Everywhere there is a terrible emptiness. All at once I find myself in the quarter where I once resided. I recall the life I used to live: meeting friends in the evening, reciting poetry, making love, spending sleepless nights pining for beautiful women and writing verses on their long tresses which held me captive. That was life! What is there left of it? Nothing. ~ Khushwant Singh

Oracle of Delphi:
In my deep mystery I breathe
your fragrance swirling in
your odourless soul
I return your mystery
revealing your destiny deep in
the seed of your God Self ~ Ramon Ravenswood

I stand still inhaling the beauty of our memories,
Flashbacks of our togetherness burn my flesh
and I breathe love through every single skin pore.

(Excerpted from The room, chapter Pain) ~ Claudia Pavel

love
wounds me
with soft pillows
with tender lips
and fingers ~ Sanober Khan

I used to do more melodic stuff, and I used to do more actual rap - like traditional hip hop vocals. I think my method of storytelling has led me to this point, at which I want to pare down my style. I think I give the lyrics more thought, and then when I try to perform the lyrics over the track I'll try it over and over again, and eventually the lyrics will sink into the track by the way I project them. ~ Galcher Lustwerk

It is a beauteous evening, calm and free,
The holy time is quiet as a Nun Breathless with adoration. ~ William Wordsworth

From everything, nothing looks to nothing. ~ Dejan Stojanovic

My business is words. Words are like labels,
or coins, or better, like swarming bees. ~ Anne Sexton

I like to chant a couple of lines of poetry into the ozone layer every day or so, another caller says. ~ Carol Shields

IT'S NOT THE HONEY WHISKEY IN A FRIDAY NIGHT - IT'S THE MANIC SHOW OF POETRY TWEETS THAT TURNS ME ON. ~ Amy King

He nearly called you again last night. Can you imagine that, after all this time? He can. He imagines calling you or running into you by chance. Depending on the weather, he imagines you in one of those cotton dresses of yours with flowers on it or in faded blue jeans and a thick woollen button-up cardigan over a checkered shirt, drinking coffee from a mug, looking through your tortoiseshell glasses at a book of poetry while it rains. He thinks of you with your hair tied back and the characteristic sweet scent on your neck. He imagines you this way when he is on the train, in the supermarket, at his parents' house, at night, alone, and when he is with a woman.

He is wrong, though. You didn't read poetry at all. He had wanted you to read poetry, but you didn't. If pressed, he confesses to an imprecise recollection of what it was you read and, anyway, it wasn't your reading that started this. It was the laughter, the carefree laughter, the three-dimensional Coca-Cola advertisement that you were, the try-anything-once friends, the imperviousness to all that came before you, the chain telephone calls, the in-jokes, the instant music, the sunlight you carried with you, the way he felt when you spoke to his parents, the introductory undergraduate courses, the inevitability of your success, the beach houses, ... ~ Elliot Perlman

America was based on a poetic vision. What will happen when it loses its poetry? ~ Azar Nafisi

Even through the smoke,
you are still the most beautiful thing
in this city and I, well, I am still
the last thing you'd save in a fire. ~ Danabelle Gutierrez

Hope
The word trills inside me. Like the lyrics of a song I knew once but had forgotten. And now it's here, suddenly. Hope on my tongue and in my heart. I cling to it, afraid of forgetting all over again ~ Shannon Dittemore

There are some bad people on the rise;
they're saving their own skins by ruining people's lives. ~ Morrissey

That night I looked Stephanie [Burt] up online and started reading more about her work...I kept encountering a striking factoid...: she's often cited as the most influential poetry critic of her generation. And she's openly trans. This is not the world I was taught I would grow into when I was a young trans child -- the one where transgender people are heard, are brilliant, are influential, are even the best. At anything. Being trans, I'd learned subliminally, was supposed to keep you from being that -- even if you loved your trans self, and even if some other trans people and a few allies did too, the world at large would keep your potential tamped down."

- from "Surface Difficulty: An Adventure in Reading Trans Poetry," Original Plumbing Magazine 2014 ~ Mitch Kellaway

Whereas Taft discouraged the young Yale student from extracurricular reading, fearful it would detract from required courses, Roosevelt read widely yet managed to stand near the top of his class. The breath of his numerous interests allowed him to draw on knowledge across various disciplines, from zoology in philosophy and religion, from poetry and drama to history and politics. ~ Doris Kearns Goodwin

If, however, the observers see the poiesis in the work they cease at once being observers. They find themselves in its time, aware that it remains unfinished, aware that their reading of the poetry is itself poetry. Infected then by the genius of the artist they recover their own genius, becoming beginners with nothing but possibility ahead of them. ~ James P. Carse

They will smile, as they always do when they plan a major attack late in the night. ~ Dejan Stojanovic

You are the sick prince of my cerise innovations and in your drowning caresses I walk the sea ~ Frank O'Hara

I will stay…
As long as you're holding my hands
I will forgive…
As long as you're willing to change
I will fight…
As long as you stand with me
I will support…
As long as you do the same
I will stay…
As long as you need 'us'
I will stay,
I will forgive,
I will fight,
I will support,
I will…
As long as you do the same. ~ Jyoti Patel

Truth is not the secret of a few'
yet
you would maybe think so
the way some
librarians
and cultural ambassadors and
especially museum directors
act

you'd think they had a corner
on it
the way they
walk around shaking
their high heads and
looking as if they never
went to the bath
room or anything

But I wouldn't blame them
if I were you
They say the Spiritual is best conceived
in abstract terms
and then too
walking around in museums always makes me
want to
'sit down'
I always feel so
constipated
in those
high altitudes ~ Lawrence Ferlinghetti

may
this poetry
be the home
you will someday
come back to. ~ Sanober Khan

...citizens of the U.S. live under an Empire of "evil doers" who have set themselves juxtaposed to humanity instilling in us from our youngest days how to slay our human element in exchange for an external existence of malnourished pride. ~ Steven Storm

To me you are a work of art, and I would give you my heart - that's if I had one. ~ Morrissey

I liked Yeats! That wild Irishman. I really loved his love of language, his flow. His chaotic ideas seemed to me just the right thing for a poet. Passion! He was always on the right side. He may be wrongheaded, but his heart was always on the right side. He wrote beautiful poetry. ~ Chinua Achebe