my life is a mess
but this moment is perfect
my life is perfect
—Terri Guillemets
my life is a mess
but this moment is perfect
my life is perfect
—Terri Guillemets
i don’t want to be
just a strand of dna
passing through time
or an echo of a face
repeated down the line
just another leaf falling
from the family tree
a bloodline that someday
ends with the end of me —
i want to be the sky
or an eternal poem
wildflowers growing
wherever seeds roam
i want to be the wind
or wandering clouds
or the rain that drifts
or a free soaring bird
or starshine at night —
eternity’s glowing
ethereal light
—Terri Guillemets
I who have loved the sound of leaves
Restlessly writhing into speech
Desire that to my silent grave
Only leaves shall reach.
So I who walked above the ground,
And leaves that danced before the sun
May meet below to form one dust
And in the earth be one.
When the last wind has stripped the boughs
Some autumn, go out anywhere
To any tree, and look beneath
The leaves: I may be there.
—Paul Engle, 1929
“A horse loves freedom, and the weariest old work horse will roll on the ground or break into a lumbering gallop when he is turned loose in the open.”
—Gerald Raftery (1905–1986), Snow Cloud, 1951
If you have not a bird inside you,
You have no reason to sing.
But if a pent bird chide you,
A beak and a bleeding wing,
Then you have reason to sing.
If merely you are clever
With thoughts and rhymes and words,
Then always your poems sever
The veins of our singing-birds,
With blades of glinting words.
Yet if a Song, without ending,
Inside you choke for breath,
And a beak, devouring, rending,
Tear through your lungs for breath,
Sing—or you bleed to death.
—Louis Golding (1895–1958), Sorrow of War, 1919
“Life is a vale of tears in which there are moments you just can’t stop giggling.”
—Robert Brault