So I find words I never thought to speak
In streets I never thought I should revisit
When I left my body on a distant shore.
― T.S. Eliot
Summer grasses,
All that remains
Of soldiers’ dreams.
― Bashō
to live in this world
you must be able
to do three things
to love what is mortal;
to hold it
against your bones knowing
your own life depends on it;
and, when the time comes to let it go,
to let it go
― Mary Oliver, New and Selected Poems, Volume One
The Road goes ever on and on
Out from the door where it began.
Now far ahead the Road has gone.
Let others follow, if they can!
Let them a journey new begin.
But I at last with weary feet
Will turn towards the lighted inn,
My evening-rest and sleep to meet.
― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings
and when we speak we are afraid
our words will not be heard
nor welcomed
but when we are silent
we are still afraid
So it is better to speak
remembering
we were never meant to survive.
― Audre Lorde, The Black Unicorn: Poems
Oh, if you’re a bird, be an early bird
And catch the worm for your breakfast plate.
If you’re a bird, be an early early bird–
But if you’re a worm, sleep late.
― Shel Silverstein, Where the Sidewalk Ends
When composing a verse let there not be a hair’s breath separating your mind from what you write; composition of a poem must be done in an instant, like a woodcutter felling a huge tree or a swordsman leaping at a dangerous enemy.
― Bashō
Once in a golden hour
I cast to earth a seed.
Up there came a flower,
The people said, a weed.
― Alfred Lord Tennyson
Trees are poems the earth writes upon the sky,
We fell them down and turn them into paper,
That we may record our emptiness.
― Kahlil Gibran
A man said to the universe:
“Sir, I exist!”
“However,” replied the universe,
“The fact has not created in me
A sense of obligation.”
― Stephen Crane, War Is Kind and Other Poems
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