Leonard Cohen Poetry Quotes

Poetry is just the evidence of life. If your life is burning well, poetry is just the ash.

first of all nothing will happen and a little later nothing will happen again

Deprivation is the mother of poetry.

Show me slowly what I only know the limits of Dance me to the end of love

so much of the world is plunged in darkness and chaos... So ring the bells that still can ring Forget your perfect offering There is a crack in everything That’s how the light gets in.

I heard of a man who says words so beautifully that if he only speaks their name women give themselves to him. If I am dumb beside your body while silence blossoms like tumors on our lips it is because I hear a man climb stairs and clear his throat outside our door.

Who could have foretold the heart grows old from touching others

At first first nothing will happen to us and later on it will happen to us again.

It was a dance of masks and every mask was perfect because every mask was a real face and every face was a real mask so there was no mask and there was no face for there was but one dance in which there was but one mask but one true face which was the same and which was a thing without a name which changed and changed into itself over and over.

Dear friend, I have searched all night through each burnt paper, but I fear I will never find the formula to let you die

Poetry is a verdict, not an occupation.

Blessed is the covenant of love, the covenant of mercy, useless light behind the terror, deathless song in the house of night.

Blessed are you who circled desire with a blade, and the garden with fiery swords, and heaven and earth with a word.

I walk through the old yellow sunlight to get to my kitchen table the poem about me lying there with the books in which I am listed among the dead and future Dylans

Bind me to your will, bind me with these threads of sorrow, and gather me out of the afternoon where I have torn my soul on twenty monstrous altars, offering all things but myself.

I pray for courage I pray for courage Now I’m old To greet the sickness And the cold I pray for courage In the night To bear the burden Make it light I pray for courage In the time When suffering comes and Starts to climb I pray for courage At the end To see death coming As a friend

He never described himself as a poet or his work as poetry. The fact that the lines do not come to the edge of the page is no guarantee. Poetry is a verdict, not an occupation. He hated to argue about the techniques of verse. The poem is a dirty, bloody, burning thing that has to be grabbed first with bare hands. Once the fire celebrated Light, the dirt Humility, the blood Sacrifice. Now the poets are professional fire-eaters, freelancing at any carnival. The fire goes down easily and honours no one in particular.

How may we be saints and live in golden coffins Who will leave on our stone shelves pathetic notes for intervention How may we be calm marble gods at ocean altars Who will murder us for some high reason

Poetry is just the evidence of life. If your life is burning well, poetry is just the ash.

We are so small between the stars, so large against the sky | and lost among these subway crowds, I try to catch your eye.

There is a crack, a crack, in everything. That's how the light gets in.

Everybody knows that the dice are loaded Everybody rolls with their fingers crossed Everybody knows that the war is over Everybody knows the good guys lost Everybody knows the fight was fixed The poor stay poor, the rich get rich That's how it goes Everybody knows Everybody knows that the boat is leaking Everybody knows that the captain lied Everybody got this broken feeling Like their father or their dog just died Everybody talking to their pockets Everybody wants a box of chocolates And a long stem rose Everybody knows

When my heart is broken as usual over someone's evanescent beauty and design after design they fade like kingdoms with no writing

I confess I meant to grow wings and lose my mind I confess that I've forgotten what for Why wings and a lost mind

All things can be done whisper museum ovens of a war that freedom won.

Here the destruction is subtle, and there the body is torn. Here the breaking is perceived, and there the dead unaware carry their putrid remains. All trade in filth, carry their filth one to another, all walk the streets as though the ground did not recoil, all stretch their necks to bite the air, as though the breath had not withdrawn. The seed bursts without a blessing, and the harvest is gathered as if it were food.

JINGLE To show the fat brain rotting like stumps of brown teeth in an old bright throat is the final clever thrill of summer lads all dead with love. So here is mine, torn and stretched for the sun, to be used for a drum or a tambourine, to be scratched with poetry by Kafka’s machine

Blessed are you who, among the numberless swept away in terror, permitted a few to suffer carefully.

Refine your longing here, in the small silver music of her preparations, under the low-built shelter of repentance.

Each day he lugged a hunk of something precious over to his boredom and once or twice a week when he was granted the tiny grace of distance he perceived that he laboured as his fathers did on someone else’s pyramid Thoughts of rebellion Thoughts of injustice New Year’s resolutions The seduction of a woman All these he engraved numbly letter by letter Walther PPK-S Serial No. 115142 stolen from one slave by another

You let me sing, you lifted me up, you have my soul a beam to travel on. You folded your distance back into my heart. You drew the tears back to my eyes. You hid me in the mountain of your word. You gave the injury a tongue to heal itself. You covered my head with my teacher's care, you bound my arm with my grandfather's strength. O beloved speaking, O comfort whispering in the terror, unspeakable explanation of the smoke and cruelty, undo the self-conspiracy, let me dare the boldness of joy.

This is the way we summon one another, but it is not the way we call upon the Name. We stand in rags, we beg for tears to dissolve the immovable landmarks of hatred. How beautiful our heritage, to have this way of speaking to eternity, how bountiful this solitude, surrounded, filled, and mastered by the Name, from which all things arise in splendour, depending one upon the other.

Sit down, master on this rude chair of praises, and rule my nervous heart with your great decrees of freedom.

O master of my breath, create a man around these nostrils, and gather my heart toward the gravity of your name. Form me again with an utterance and open my mouth with your praise. There is no life but in affirming you, no world to walk on but the one which you create.

In the thin light of hunted pleasure, I become afraid that I will never know my sorrow. I call on you with a cry that concentrates the heart. When will I cry out in gratitude? When will I sing to your mercy?

I love Leonard Cohen, but he's not the guy you want on in the background when you're working or whatever." "Brilliant. I've studied his poetry, of course, but never heard him sing." "My mom loved him. She had a taste for dark themes, sad music- all that regret, you know- and Cohen has this great, deep voice, rumbly, raw, but it's the words that make his songs. He was such an old, old soul, especially about relationships.

I saw you watching the moon you did note hesitate to love me with it I saw you honouring the wind-flowers caught in the rocks you loved me with them

Sit in a chair and keep still. Let the dancer's shoulders emerge from your shoulders, the dancer's chest from your chest, the dancer's loins from your loins, the dancer's hips and thighs from yours; and from your silence the throat that makes a sound, and from your bafflement a clear song to which the dancer moves...

Kindle the darkness of my calling, let me cry to the one who judges the heart in justice and mercy. Arouse my heart again with the limitless breath you breathe into me, arouse the secret from obscurity.

...and tremble before the furnace of light in which you are formed and to which you return, until the time when he suspends his light and withdraws into himself, and there is no world, and there is no soul anywhere.

Let him lie among the strings until there is no hope for his daily strategy, until he cries, I am yours, I am your creature.

Blessed are you who speaks to the unworthy.

In the hopelessness of every other thing, you make your place, you strengthen your presence, and I ask yo bow down before the lord of my life.

Awaken me, lord, from the dream of despair, and let me describe my sin. I would not fall into the bewilderment to which your name invited me. I established a court, and I fell asleep under a crown, and I dreamed I could rule the wicked. Awaken me to the homeland of my heart where you are worshipped forever. Awaken me to the mercy of the breath which you breathe into me.

Poets are mostly voters and taxpayers, but the alienation of the poet is a common theme. Among poets there are also probably higher than average rates of clutch burnout, job turnover, rooting about, sleep apnea, noncompliance, nervous leg syndrome, depression, litigation, black clothing, and so forth, but this is where we live, or as Leonard Cohen put it, poetry is the opiate of the poets.