So hope for a great sea-changeOn the far side of revenge.Believe that further shoreIs reachable from here.
PostscriptAnd some time make the time to drive out westInto County Clare, along the Flaggy Shore,In September or October, when the windAnd the light are working off each otherSo that the ocean on one...
Only the very stupid or the very deprived can any longer help knowing that the documents of civilization have been written in blood and tears, blood and tears no less real for being very remote.
It is difficult at times to repress the thought that history is about as instructive as an abattoir; that Tacitus was right and that peace is merely the desolation left behind after the decisive opera...
I composed habits for those acresso that my last look would beneither gluttonous nor starved.I was ready to go anywhere.
You lose more of yourself than you redeem doing the decent thing. Keep at a tangentWhen they make the circle wide, it's time to swim Out on your own and fill the element with signatures on your own fr...
To work, her dumb lunge says,is to move a certain mass...through a certain distance,is to pull your weight and feelexact and equal to it.Feel dragged upon. And buoyant.
Sometimes at pagan shrines they vowedofferings to idols, swore oaths that the killer of souls might come to their aid and save the people. That was their way, their heathenish hope; deep in their hear...
Once off the bushThe fruit fermented, the sweet flesh would turn sour.I always felt like crying. It wasn't fairThat all the lovely canfuls smelt of rot.
And here is lovelike a tinsmith's scoopsunk past its gleanin the meal-bin.--Sunlight
We want what the woman wanted in the prison queue in Leningrad, standing there with cold and whispering for fear, enduring the terror of Stalin's regime and asking the poet Anna Akhmatova if she could...
The main thing is to writefor the joy of it. Cultivate a work-lustthat imagines its haven like your hands at nightdreaming the sun in the sunspot of a breast.You are fasted now, light-headed, dangerou...
The diamond absolutes.I am neither internee nor informer;An inner emigre, grown long-hairedAnd thoughtful; a wood-kerneEscaped from the massacre,Taking protective colouringFrom bole and bark, feelingE...
Meanwhile, the swordbegan to wilt into gory icicles, to slather and thaw. It was a wonderful thing, the way it all melted as ice melts when the Father eases the fetters off the frostand unravels the w...
If self is a location, so is love:Bearings taken, markings, cardinal points,Options, obstinacies, dug heels, and distance,Here and there and now and then, a stance.
I was six when I first saw kittens drown.Dan Taggart pitched them, ‘the scraggy wee shits’,Into a bucket; a frail metal sound, Soft paws scraping like mad. But their tiny dinWas soon soused. They wer...
Bebeorh þé ðone bealo-níð, Béowulf léofa,secg betsta, ond þé þæt sélre gecéos,éce rǽdas; ofer-hýda ne gým,mǽre cempa! Nú is þines mægnes blǽdáne hwíle; eft sóna biðþæt þec ádl oððe ecg eafoþes getwǽfe...
Archibald MacLeish affirmed that ‘A poem should be equal to / not true’. As a defiant statement of poetry’s gift for telling truth but telling it slant, this is both cogent and corrective. Yet there a...
The hall towered,gold-shingled and gabled, and the guest slept in ituntil the black raven with raucous gleeannounced heaven's joy, and a hurry of brightnessoverran the shadows.
Late August, given heavy rain and sunFor a full week, the blackberries would ripen.At first, just one, a glossy purple clotAmong others, red, green, hard as a knot.You ate that first one and its flesh...