#poetry

I have seen it over and over, the same sea, the same, slightly, indifferently swinging above the stones, icily free above the stones, above the stones and then the world. If you should dip your hand in, your wrist would ache immediately, your bones would begin to ache and your hand would burn as if the water were a transmutation of fire that feeds on stones and burns with a dark gray flame. If you tasted it, it would first taste bitter, then briny, then surely burn your tongue. It is like what we imagine knowledge to be: dark, salt, clear, moving, utterly free, drawn form the cold hard mouth of the world, derived from the rocky breasts forever, flowing and drawn, and since our knowledge is historical, flowing, and flown. ↗

— Elizabeth Bishop

#poetry #imagination

After the leaves have fallen, we return To a plain sense of things. It is as if We had come to an end of the imagination, Inanimate in an inert savoir. ↗

— Wallace Stevens

#imagination

Being in prison for seven years was like being in an army that never drilled, never deployed, and only fought itself. ↗

— Raegan Butcher

#poetry #prison #social-commentary #sociology #sociology

What an incredible amount of poetry, of novels, of sociological solutions to the ills of the world! One supposes that poetry is written to enrich the spirit; that novels have been conceived at the very least, to entertain us; and even, optimistically, that sociological solutions are a guide to solving something. Viewing the situation calmly, I realized that the first (poetry) was capable of impoverishing the richest spirit, the second of boring the most joyful, the third of confusing the most lucid. ↗

— Augusto Monterroso

#sociology

Crystal ball and candle light, I want your dance tonight. Show me the power of love as we stand together in the middle of the night. ↗

— Santosh Kalwar

#love #poetry #funny

I imagined I was God for a millisecond And became speechless for a long time. ↗

— Dejan Stojanovic

#god #imagination #literature #literature-quotes #poetry

... You can't be with God and be neutral. / True contemplation is resistance. And poetry, / gazing at clouds is resistance I found out in jail. ↗

— Ernesto Cardenal

#marxism #poetry #catholicism

I GO DOWN TO THE SHORE I go down to the shore in the morning and depending on the hour the waves are rolling in or moving out, and I say, oh, I am miserable, what shall— what should I do? And the sea says in its lovely voice: Excuse me, I have work to do. ↗

— Mary Oliver

#poetry #love

Books are carefully folded forests/void of autumn/bound from the sun ↗

— Saul Williams

#autumn

GATHERING LEAVES Spades take up leaves No better than spoons, And bags full of leaves Are light as balloons. I make a great noise Of rustling all day Like rabbit and deer Running away. But the mountains I raise Elude my embrace, Flowing over my arms And into my face. I may load and unload Again and again Till I fill the whole shed, And what have I then? Next to nothing for weight, And since they grew duller From contact with earth, Next to nothing for color. Next to nothing for use. But a crop is a crop, And who's to say where The harvest shall stop? ↗

— Robert Frost

#poetry #autumn