Every poem breaks a silence that had to be overcome.
How we dwelt in two worlds the daughters and the mothers in the kingdom of the sons.
I believe that words can help us move or keep us paralyzed, and that our choices of language and verbal tone have something – a great deal – to do with how we live our lives.
To seek visions, to dream dreams, is essential, and it is also essential to try new ways of living, to make room for serious experimentation, to respect the effort even where it fails.
We can count on so few people to go that hard way with us.
War is an absolute failure of imagination, scientific and political. That a war can be represented as helping a people to ‘feel good’ about themselves, or their country, is a measure of that failure.
It will take all your heart, it will take all your breath It will be short, it will not be simple.
It’s exhilarating to be alive in a time of awakening consciousness; it can also be confusing, disorienting, and painful.
The moment of change is the only poem.
The mother’s battle for her child with sickness, with poverty, with war, with all the forces of exploitation and callousness that cheapen human life needs to become a common human battle, waged in love and in the passion for survival.
False history gets made all day, any day, the truth of the new is never on the news.
I came to explore the wreck.
I feel more helpless with you than without you.
Art means nothing if it simply decorates the dinner table of power which holds it hostage.
It is the thirtieth of May, the thirtieth of November, a beginning or an end, we are moving into the solstice and there is so much here I still do not understand.
Art and literature have given so many people the relief of feeling connected – pulled us out of isolation. It has let us know that somebody else breathed and dreamed and had sex and loved and raged and knew loneliness the way we do.
For now, poetry has the capacity – in its own ways and by its own means – to remind us of something we are forbidden to see.
We who were loved will never unlive that crippling fever.
Poetry is the liquid voice that can wear through stone.
We move but our words stand become responsible for more than we intended and this is verbal privilege.