Some Favorite Snippets

A belief in happiness bred
despair, though despair could be assuaged
by belief, which required faith,
which made those who had it
one-eyed amid the beautiful contraries.

—Stephen Dunn, from Circular



It's possible that while sleeping the hand
that sows the seeds of stars
started the ancient music going again

—like a note from a great harp—
and the frail wave came to our lips
as one or two honest words.

—Antonio Machado, It's Possible



I am the man
Whose name is mud
But what's in a name
To shame the one who knows
Mud does not stain
Clay he's made of
Dust Adam became—
The dust he was—
Was he his name

—Samuel Menashe, Adam Means Earth



I apologize to coincidence for calling it necessity.
I apologize to necessity just in case I'm mistaken.

—Wislawa Szymborska, from Under A Certain Little Star



Why, if this interval of being can be spent serenely
in the form of a laurel, slightly darker than all
other green, with tiny waves on the edges
of every leaf (like the smile of a breeze)—: why then
have to be human—and, escaping from fate,
keep longing for fate?

—Rainer Maria Rilke, from The Duino Elegies



It's what we can't
know that interests
us—the pre-Greeks
or Australopithicus—
where there are more
absences and breaks
than bits of bone
or pot. It's not
news, but it
fascinates—our
love of hints, our
mending minds that
love to patch up
other times like
plates, and how this
might extrapolate
to hearts: explaining
how here can be
too much matching part.

—Kay Ryan, Not News



One could
almost wish
they wouldn't;
they are so
far apart,
so random.
One cannot
wait, cannot
abandon waiting.
The three or
four occasions
of their landing
never fade.
Should there
be more, there
will never be
enough to make
a pattern
that can equal
the commanding
way they matter.

—Kay Ryan, The Pieces That Fall To Earth



The purpose of poetry is to remind us
how difficult it is to remain just one person.

—Czeslaw Milosz, from Ars Poetica?



When the lover
goes, the vow though
broken remains, that
trace of eternity love
brings down among us
stays, to give
dignity to the suffering
and to intensify it.

—Galway Kinnell, The Vow



In joy and terror
I move in time where
nothing points to error;
I move in space
where love's event,
and death's, notch
time's face.

—Josephine Jacobsen, from The Clock



Joy's trick is to supply
Dry lips with what can cool and slake,
Leaving them dumbstruck also with an ache
Nothing can satisfy.

—Richard Wilbur, from Hamlen Brook



I prefer the absurdity of writing poems
to the absurdity of not writing poems.

—Wislawa Szymborska, from Possibilities



... it is not so much to know the self
as to know it as it is known
by galaxy and cedar cone,
as if birth had never found it
and death could never end it ...

—A. R. Ammons, from Gravelly Run