—MAYBE I’M AMAZED

 

  

“Nobody ever figures out what life is all about, and it doesn't matter. Explore the world. Nearly everything is really interesting if you go into it deeply enough. Work as hard and as much as you want to on the things you like to do the best. Don't think about what you want to be, but what you want to do. Keep up some kind of a minimum with other things so that society doesn't stop you from doing anything at all. ~Richard Feynman

 

“In the end, everyone is aware of this: nobody keeps any of what he has and life is only a borrowing of bones.” Pablo Neruda

 

 

Alive Together / Lisel Mueller

 

“Even now, when the plot

calls for me to turn to stone,

the sun intervenes. Some mornings

in summer I step outside

and the sky opens

and pours itself into me

as if I were a saint

about to die.”

 

“There is no agony like bearing an untold story inside you.” – Zora Neale Hurston

 

"Tell me where the big people are, please. The big, reckless, brilliant people who believe passionately in doing something good and noble and inventive. I'll rest in their shadow or I'll help them balance their weight. I pray that they'll hire me or teach me. I'm so tired of small people and small things. It doesn't have to be a small world." Jeanne Moreau

 

 

Unseen Rain, Jalal al-Din Rumi 

 

“I have lived on the lip

of insanity, wanting to know reasons,

knocking on a door. It opens.

I’ve been knocking from the inside.”

 

 

The Kingfisher / Amy Clampitt

 

“Moving on or going back to where you came from,

bad news is what you mainly travel with:

a breakup or a breakdown, someone running off

or walking out, called up or called home:

death in the family. Nudged from their stanchions

outside the terminal, anonymous of purpose

as a flock of birds, the bison of the highway

funnel westward onto Route 80, mirroring

an entity that cannot look into itself and know

what makes it what it is.”

 

 

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

 

 

“Poetry is eternal graffiti written 

in the heart of everyone.” 

--Lawrence Ferlinghetttie 

 

“One way to escape the universe in which everything is a kind of media cartoon is to write about the part of your life that doesn’t feel like a cartoon, and how the cartoon comes into it.” – Robert Hass

 

“I was a late bloomer. But anyone who blooms at all, ever, is very lucky.” Sharon Olds

 

“Every storm runs out of rain.” Maya Angelou

 

“My key

has lost its house.

I go from house to house

but none fits.

I have found

the locksmith.

My key fits

into his grave.” 

–Rose Ausländer

 

 

As The Poems Go

 

as the poems go into the thousands you

realize that you've created very

little.

it comes down to the rain, the sunlight,

the traffic, the nights and the days of the

years, the faces.

leaving this will be easier than living

it, typing one more line now as

a man plays a piano through the radio,

the best writers have said very

little

and the worst,

far too much.

--Charles Bukowski