Life Is A Poem Quotes

Life is for the living. Death is for the dead. Let life be like music. And death a note unsaid.

Magic Sandra’s seen a leprechaun, Eddie touched a troll, Laurie danced with witches once, Charlie found some goblins gold. Donald heard a mermaid sing, Susy spied an elf, But all the magic I have known I've had to make myself.

The monsters were never under my bed. Because the monsters were inside my head. I fear no monsters, for no monsters I see. Because all this time the monster has been me.

The Peace of Wild Things When despair for the world grows in me and I wake in the night at the least sound in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be, I go and lie down where the wood drake rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds. I come into the peace of wild things who do not tax their lives with forethought of grief. I come into the presence of still water. And I feel above me the day-blind stars waiting with their light. For a time I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

Like snow melt and passing leaves, we show our faces then are gone, and like rivers we pour.

Daring to raise my eyes, I call out, a bird-like sound, giving myself to this day, abandoning desire for all except you.

Against the tide of violence something spoken from the silence like an arrow parting air with the sharpened point of love.  

Like the ancients I leave no trace but the imprint of kindness, left on the souls I’ve dared to love.

There's a woman asleep in the body of salmon behind the jagged teeth and furious jaw, parting the river with wild desire.

Down the narrow trail to the sound of sea lions barking their belonging, we wandered into their world, the one we thought was ours.

Let me rise in darkness, be fed by morning silence and choose each day to say yes.  

Just Let them. If they want to choose something or someone over you, LET THEM. If they want to go weeks without talking to you, LET THEM. If they are okay with never seeing you, LET THEM. If they are okay with always putting themselves first, LET THEM. If they are showing you who they are and not what you perceived them to be, LET THEM. If they want to follow the crowd, LET THEM. If they want to judge or misunderstand you, LET THEM. If they act like they can live without you, LET THEM. If they want to walk out of your life and leave, hold the door open, AND LET THEM. Let them lose you. You were never theirs, because you were always your own. So let them.

And I discovered Norton’s anthology of poetry in the patients’ library – it changed my life. I read the poems over and over again before I began to grasp their meanings. It wasn’t just that the words were musical notes my eyes could sing. It was the discovery that women and men, long dead, had left me messages about their feelings, emotions I could compare to my own. I had finally found others who were as lonely as I was. In an odd way, that knowledge comforted me.

There might be someone you love, some one you wanted to be with, and then, found your self with, there were such things, such lives and lovers. I am like that sometimes, I think, some distant romantic wrapped in music. I wanted to know myself, and found that was a lifetime's work, the twists and zig zags, dips and turns, all could disorient you, that you were no longer you but somebody else masquerading as yourself's desire. Rain could come. The sky grow light. It could even be twilight, in a foreign town. Where you walked under far noises of invisible worlds. But when you remember all of your faces, blown now gone forever in the wind, you'll see that you were always wanting to be you, you were always wanting to know and love yourself, and you found a few faces, a few names, that extended your life into other lives, and as time marches, hours, days, decades dance, you'll find your hand in someone else's hand, you'll hear yourself thinking about some person other than you and then look up and yes there will be some other person some closeness and echoed tenderness, that makes us more than dots under the far away, that make us more than split seconds of light