Poetry Quotes

She tasted of coffee and day old poetry.

~ R. Y.s. Perez

you're the fly on the wall hearing all, seeing allears of a wall hearing all the secretsperhaps you're the vines creeping over the old abandoned mansion wallsdusty, soulless and deadbringing a certain curious life to rubbleand I think you're the jewel-eyed geckosneaking around the warm summer wallsbetween jasmine and olive branchessticky pad toes, clinging to the wallspeeking in at lonely summer spicy love-makingthrough silk curtains from the bright orientbreathing in incense and tasting decadenceclimbing the sharply barbed wallsthe smooth cemented white-washed wallsbecause walls breathe too

~ Moonshine Noire

Autumn stomps around outside the houselike an annoying little sister, tappingon all the shutters, kicking up the pilesof leaves you rake, pretending to howllike a wolf. But I'm glad she's here,so we can cuss at Summer together,pretending we don't even remember her name.

~ Karen Finneyfrock

Laying in a hammock, darkness surrounds me.

~ Fida Islaih

Here, Earth-born, over the lilt of the water,Lisping its music and bearing a burden of light,Bosoming day as a laughing and radiant daughter…Here we may whisper unheard, unafraid of the night.Walking alone…was it splendor, or what, we were bound with?Deep in the time when summer lets down her hair?Shadows we loved and the patterns they covered the ground withTapestries, mystical, faint in the breathless air.

~ F. Scott Fitzgerald

Early Summer, loveliest season,The world is being colored in.While daylight lasts on the horizon,Sudden, throaty blackbirds sing.The dusty-colored cuckoo cuckoos.Welcome, summer is what he says.Winter's unimaginable.The wood's a wickerwork of boughs.Summer means the river's shallow,Thirsty horses nose the pools.Long heather spreads out on bog pillows.White bog cotton droops in bloom.Swallows swerve and flicker up.Music starts behind the mountain.There's moss and a lush growth underfoot.Spongy marshland glugs and stutters.Bog banks shine like ravens' wings.The cuckoo keeps on calling welcome.The speckled fish jumps; and the strongSwift warrior is up and running.A little, jumpy, chirpy fellowHits the highest note there is;The lark sings out his clear tidings.Summer, shimmer, perfect days.

~ Marie Heaney

VISIONS OF GRANDEURI'm walking through a sheet of glass instead of the door,Flying over a giant candlestick lighting up Central Park,Repeating two courses at Hard Knock's College,And swimming through the Red Sea with silky jelly fish.I'm hopping over an empty row house in Philadelphia,Getting a seventy dollar manicure on a gondola in Venice,Wearing a white pearl necklace stolen from Goodwill,And running my first New York City marathon.I'm discussing the meaning of life with my late cat Charlie.Dating John Doe- the thirty-third chef at the White House,Running non-stop on a broken leg through a bomb-blasted city,And keeping a multi-lingual monkey named Alfredo as my pet.I'm spying on two hundred and twenty-two homegrown terrorists from Iowa,Worshiped by a red-headed gorilla named Salamander,Sleeping with a giant teddy bear dressed in black leather,And wearing hot pink lipstick over a shade of midnight blue.

~ Giorge Leedy

Love is poetry plus biology.

~ Lawrence Durrell

Why is it that you still beguile me –As wind, stone, bird – and all the likes? Why is that you smile on me – With sudden summer lightning strikes?

~ Anna Akhmatova

Stand tall, my friends, when the fool comes around.

~ Ross Caligiuri

When did we revert back to sticks and shields,Uniform uniforms, stylized agenda reveals,Hiding behind glass with nods to our reflection,Blocking out the light that sparked the deception?Who do we see staring across the isle,A path once for feet now stretched into miles,Removed from our view to a place unseen,Forcing poisonous venom through a flickering screen?Where should we gather outside of the homes,But a place for the masses to manifest from their phones,The hatred and evil broadcasting the waves,Telling you daily, “Elvis lives and Jesus saves”?What could restart a flawed mental state,Built on cause and guilt for an unfulfilled faithIn policy, redemption, a nation self aware,Our values compressed and trapped in despair?How can we rise with the odds in their favor,Sedated once more, still waiting for a SaviorWilling to spare from thoughts profound?Stand tall, my friends, when the fool comes around.

~ Ross Caligiuri

Time machine to the pastStep back a few yearsOld feelings, like LazarusSuddenly reappear.It's your song on the radioAnd it's your hand in mineAs this wave crashes over meOur stars again come unaligned.

~ Justin Wetch

Kiss the lips upon me once, and I shall never tell.

~ Chrissy Moon

Don't kiss me if you're afraid of thunder. My life is a storm.

~ Anita Krizzan

Winter's last rain and a light I don't recognize through the trees and I come back in my mind to the man who made me suck his cock when I was seven, in sunlight, between boxcars. I thought I could leave him standing there in the years, half smile on his lips,small hands curled into small fists,but after he finished, he held my hand in hisas if astonished, until the houses were visiblejust beyond the railyard. He held my hand but before that he slapped me hard on the face when I would not open my mouth for him. I do not want to say his whole hips slammed into me, but they did, and a black wave washed over my brain, changing me so I could not move among my people in the old way.On my way home I stopped in the churchyard to try to find a way to stay alive. In the branches a red-wing flitted, warning me. In the rectory, Father preparedthe body and the blood for mass but God could not save me from a mouthful of cum. That afternoon some lives turned away from the light. He taught me how to move my tongue around. In his hands he held my head like a lover. Say it clearly and you make it beautiful, no matter what.

~ Bruce Weigl

Waldo nodded and waved goodbye pathetically, like a young father going off to war. As soon as the door was closed and he was gone, Jeanne squelched her own apprehensions, opened the paper and read the poem Waldo had written for her:One taste of Jeanne and out I flewWildly, madly, in no directionBut hers, and yet so straight and trueI fly towards her with no protectionIt feels so strange to move this wayThough I should land, desire it seemsMoves in strange circles and so I stayDisoriented beyond my wildest dreams.

~ Donald Jeffries

i hugged myself as a child & told Myself that everything was perfect in the petrichor The smell of pure innocence & earthy & earthly Innocence that stays in the clothes I only wear on good days…

~ Jay Sheets

Then one day I found my head when I wasn't even trying.

~ Cat Stevens

Float beyond the world of trees. Out into the whispering breeze, past the rushes, past the weeds, past the marsh's waving reeds.

~ J.r.r. Tolkien

the rain in this room is low and thickand undressing my heart through the air. – intimacy 

~ Nayyirah Waheed

I offer you my mouth—Let me marry my lips to the tops of your thighs,I kneel between your legs. I offer you my hands—Your name written all over my palms,the fingers I press against you.I offer you my hips—My apologetic body.

~ Chantelle Ann

...the religion of the heart is as intimate as a wish breathed to the night sky...

~ John Geddes

Every breath we take from the airTakes oxygen from an insect’s lungs mid-prayerAnd every exhalation does loudly declareThat in the currency of life, we’re millionaires.A butterfly flapped it’s wings and Rome fellA passerby’s whistle cracked the liberty bellAnd I dare urge the daring not to yellLest we so bid a skyscraper a rough farewell.A snake’s tongue slithered and man did sinLet me tell you how the waves from a shark’s finDid set the tides on D-Day and let the allies win;Chance and destiny are identical twins.A word was spoken and the earth createdAnother phrase and the future was dictatedAnd so every action must be carefully weightedWe just never know how things are interrelated.

~ Justin Wetch

Drinking the energy of the universeBreathing along with the CosmosWith each breathI am rebornInto a brand new existence.

~ Ilchi Lee

A poet is someone who can use a single image to send a universal message.

~ Andrei Tarkovsky

Vanessa insisted that film was exactly like poetry. Nothing necessarily had to happen, you just had to feel something.

~ Cecily Von Ziegesar

America—where we hate our fathers, love our mothers, andeveryone is hung up on tryingto be a man

~ Phil Volatile

My mother's deathchanged the alchemy of food.Holidays run together nowlike ungrooved rivers. I forgetwhat they are for. I buy bakery goods.They look deadunder the blue lights.I don't do anything the way she taught mebut I get fat.I don't look like her and I don't soundlike her, but I stand like her.

~ Florence Weinberger

All my contemporaries—hundred-and-fivers or convicts—will tell you how we livedin barely sentient fear, raisingchildren for the executioner,prison, or the torture chamber.

~ Anna Akhmatova

My wife is a lovely leathery green, the blue-tongued lizard said;Her eyes are as red as bulldog ants, lurking in holes in her head;Her body is made of the speckled grass, a violet grows on her tongue,And I could watch her for fifty years if nobody blundered along.

~ Douglas Stewart

Remember: In poetry, each word is like a loaded gun; very heavy, and full of intent

~ Amber Drappier

A loner by nature and an introvert... i am a twinkling star, burning bright amidst a cloudless night. As such, i tend to fade in and out of people's lives. This aspect of me is often misunderstood as rejection or a lack of love and caring. In reality, the only way i can survive as an introvert, is to drop from the sky, from time-to-time, recharging within the energizing landscape of my inner-universe. To love me, is to let me me have the space i need to illuminate the sky. I can't be taken hostage or held captive. Inner-light is what gives my star its twinkle.

~ Jaeda Dewalt

My exclamation mark formed into a question markIt hunched over and second-guessed itselfMaybe life is not so well understoodMaybe life is confusing after all

~ Michal Coret

As we know, Rilke, under the influence of Auguste Rodin, whom he had assisted between 1905 and 1906 in Meudon as a private secretary, turned away from the art nouveau-like, sensitized-atmospheric poetic approach of his early years to pursue a view of art determined more strongly by the priority of the object. The proto-modern pathos of making way for the object without depicting it in a manner 'true to nature', like that of the old masters, led in Rilke's case to the concept of the thing-poem - and thus to a temporarily convincing new answer to the question of the source of aesthetic and ethical authority. From that point, it would be the things themselves from which all authority would come - or rather: from this respectively current singular thing that turns to me by demanding my full gaze. This is only possible because thing-being would now no longer mean anything but this: having something to say.

~ Peter Sloterdijk

BugleBlack beetles know where the most recent bonesbake in the heat, tendons and meat long gone, bleached white, and if you give them cheap wine --drizzle a few red drops on a flat stone--they will lead you to a barren gulchsurrounded by sages and nettles, dirtburnt to powdery sand and sharp thorns. Hunchabove the skeleton, bow your head, start reciting verses you learned as a child, there, under the sun with rocks and brush, bare locust tree a telling reliquary of dust to dust, all so brutally hot. You must pull ribs from that rotting body,words that matter: love me, love me not.

~ Tod Marshall

In my mind he is a demon and a godand I blame him, I blame him, I blame himfor the world I created on my ownas much as the one he built around me.

~ Miriam Joy

If poetry escapes my mouth then it shall seek comfort in your heart. Will you keep it safe?

~ Delano Johnson

By nature, we want to be liked. We want to be accepted. But, most of the time, we allow our worth to be decided by the people on the sidelines. By people that see snapshots of our life but have no clue what the whole picture looks like.

~ Liz Newman

In September countless sand and house-martins jazz above the river, taking insects from the surface, from the air, thousands of birds kissing the river farewell. They creak, a sound like the air rubbing against itself. Summer is everything they know; they're preparing themselves, sensing in the shortening days a door they must dash through before it shuts.

~ Kathleen Jamie

And every year there is a brief, startling moment When we pause in the middle of a long walk home and Suddenly feel something invisible and weightless Touching our shoulders, sweeping down from the air: It is the autumn wind pressing against our bodies; It is the changing light of fall falling on us.

~ Edward Hirsch