Poetry

I ask them to take a poem and hold it up to the light like a color slide or press an ear against its hive.

— Billy Collins · Introduction To Poetry

you shall above all things be glad and young For if you’re young,whatever life you wear it will become you;and if you are glad whatever’s living will yourself become.

— e.e. cummings · [you shall above all things be glad]

(translated by Robert Bly) I can tell by the way the trees beat, after so many dull days, on my worried window panes that a storm is coming,

— Rainer Maria Rilke · The Man Watching

We think by feeling. What is there to know? I hear my being dance from ear to ear. I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.

— Theodore Roethke · The Waking

Waking alone At the hour when we are Trembling with tenderness Lips that would kiss Form prayers to broken stone.

— T.S. Eliot · The Hollow Men

Lord: it is time. The summer was immense. Lay your shadow upon the sundials, and on the meadows let the winds go free. Command the last fruits to be full;

— Rainer Maria Rilke · Autumn Day

AS I lay with my head in your lap, Camerado, The confession I made I resume— what I said to you in the open air I resume: I know I am restless, and make others so;

— Walt Whitman · Epitaph for a Friend

How shall I hold my soul, so that it does not touch on yours? How shall I lift it beyond you to other things? Ah, gladly would I house it with something

— Rainer Maria Rilke · Love Song

I That is no country for old men. The young In one another's arms, birds in the trees, —Those dying generations—at their song,

— William Butler Yeats · Sailing To Byzantium

The nutritionist said I should eat root vegetables Said if I could get down 13 turnips a day I would be grounded, rooted.

— Andrea Gibson · The Nutritionist

there's a bluebird in my heart that wants to get out but I'm too tough for him, I say, stay in there, I'm not going

— Charles Bukowski · Bluebird

Foreign Cass was the youngest and most beautiful of Five Sisters Cass was The Most Beautiful Girl In Town

— Charles Bukowski · The Most Beautiful Woman in Town

Whose woods these are I think I know. His house is in the village though; He will not see me stopping here To watch his woods fill up with snow.

— Robert Frost · Stopping by Woods on a Snowy…

When I do count the clock that tells the time, And see the brave day sunk in hideous night; When I behold the violet past prime, And sable curls all silver’d o’er with white;

— William Shakespeare · Sonnet 12: When I Do Count

What’s madness but nobility of soul At odds with circumstance? The day’s on fire\! I know the purity of pure despair, My shadow pinned against a sweating wall.

— Theodore Roethke · In a Dark Time

The wayfarer, Perceiving the pathway to truth, Was struck with astonishment. It was thickly grown with weeds.

— Stephen Crane · The Wayfarer

Long live the weeds that overwhelm My narrow vegetable realm\! – The bitter rock, the barren soil That force the son of man to toil;

— Theodore Roethke · Long Live The Weeds

I stopped looking for you I stopped waiting for you I stopped dying for you and I started dying for myself

— Leonard Cohen · I stopped looking for you

(I Ask For Silence) Translated by Heidi Fischbach Now if you’d leave me in peace. Now if you’d get on without me. I am going to close my eyes And I only want five things, five favorite roots. The first is love without end. The second is to see autumn. I cannot be without leaves f…

— Pablo Neruda · Pido Silencio (I Ask For Silence)