Lighthouse Poems Quotes

If lighthouse becomes a burning candle, flickered upon ocean's insanity. Your sailing heart there anchors to handle the obsessed breeze towards sand dune's vanity.

It seems to me that the desire to make art produces an ongoing experience of longing, a restlessness sometimes, but not inevitably, played out romantically, or sexually. Always there seems something ahead, the next poem or story, visible, at least, apprehensible, but unreachable. To perceive it at all is to be haunted by it; some sound, some tone, becomes a torment — the poem embodying that sound seems to exist somewhere already finished. It’s like a lighthouse, except that, as one swims towards it, it backs away.

Be like the sun who fell in love with the moon and shared all his light. Be like the moon who became a lighthouse to guide others in the night. Be like the mountains who were once hills that wanted to kiss the sky. Be like the trees who are firmly grounded but dream up high. Be like the waves who play and tickle each other endlessly. Be like the children who enjoy and live in the present entirely. Be like the God who equally loves everything and everyone. And be like the love who brought compassion when she visited the sun.

Touch was absolutely out of the question. I couldn’t stop sweating. My heart, a butterfly pinned to a glacier. Empires fell inside my mouth. I touched myself like a pogrom & broke my sex into a history of inconsequential shames. I wept viciously inside of my own stomach & had it condemned. From an upside-down bell I drank silence, subsisted on the memory of someone else’s hands. Wolves sang & I did not answer. I forgot their names. Mornings were the worst, then there were days & evenings. Streetlights & darkened sycamore & suburban grief so full it made me foolish. I shattered my fist on the Lord’s jaw. Sorrow sat, licking my wrists & my neck. I slept at its convenience. O, uncelebrated body. My penis, a lighthouse on the bottom of the ocean, shining shadows at the undersides of boats. Nobody drowned for so many years. Desperate for the making of those candy-throated ghosts, I found the rooms between the violence of comets. I threw myself into anything’s path. Even the sky bent around me. How lonely to be something that nothing wants to kill. (So I Locked Myself Inside A Star for Twenty Years)

[Mr Carmichael brought out a volume of poems that spring, which had an unexpected success. The war, people said, had revived their interest in poetry.]

We are a short poem in a endless emptiness page, words are lighthouses that ignites and struggle to deliver light to the dark edges of the infinite, and mystic sounds struggle to give voice to the unlived beings, to bore a young soul to the gate of birth.

Like clay was the sand in my fingers, moulding into hooded, echoing figures. Past clay voices mixed with sea water, gurgling words of anger and blame. I now smear sand clay upon my dress, white linen heavy with new marks. I carry the harsh voices as I spin around and open my arms to the lighthouse. [New Clay Linen]

The Lighthouse by Stewart Stafford Apart and alone, From where the ships dock, Stands the white sentinel edifice on a promontory rock. Like the land's index finger, At the extent of the sea, Warning passing vessels where it's safe to be. It's one luminous eye, Swivels around its clear head, To keep lucky sailors off the seabed. It seeks no credit, And needs no thanks, Saluting proudly from above the fog banks. © Stewart Stafford, 2021. All rights reserved.

We have heard that a few days after this, when the Provincetown Bank was robbed, speedy emissaries from Provincetown made particular inquiries concerning us at this lighthouse. Indeed, they traced us all the way down the Cape, and concluded that we came by this unusual route down the back side and on foot in order that we might discover a way to get off with our booty when we had committed the robbery. The Cape is so long and narrow, and so bare withal, that it is well-nigh impossible for a stranger to visit it without the knowledge of its inhabitants generally, unless he is wrecked on to it in the night. So, when this robbery occurred, all their suspicions seem to have at once centered on us two travelers who had just passed down it. If we had not chanced to leave the Cape so soon, we should probably have been arrested. The real robbers were two young men from Worcester County who traveled with a centre-bit, and are said to have done their work very neatly. But the only bank that we pried into was the great Cape Cod sand-bank, and we robbed it only of an old French crown piece, some shells and pebbles, and the materials of this story.

Here are the crossroads where old women come Under the quarter moon to cast their spells, And where young lovers meet to argue out The secret terms of their surrender. It is a place that each sees differently- The salesman scouting, soldiers tramping home, The scholar napping by the riverbank While someone else's fortune drifts downstream. But if you stand at crossroads long enough, Most of the eager world comes strutting by- Businessmen, preachers, cats-all going somewhere, Even the Devil striking up a deal. I used to wonder if they ever got there. Be careful here in choosing where to turn. You learn a lot by staying in one place But never how the story truly ends.

Of all the works by Victor Hugo the poetic generation of 1880 preferred above all the Chansons des Rues et des Bois ('Songs of the Streets and Woods') and the late poems such as Ce que dit Ia Bouche d'Ombre ('What says the mouth of shadow'), written during a period of intense spiritualism. Quite apart from drawings done during seances, for the most part caricatures, hob-goblins and ghouls, the graphic work of Hugo is that of a visionary. Wood engravers beautifully reproduced these visions as illustrations for Le Rhin ('The Rhine') or Les Travailleurs de la Mer ('The Toilers of the Sea'). Drawn beside cursed romantic castles and storm-tossed lighthouses, ink blots become angels or skeletons, accidental stains become souls or flowers, ambiguities and metamorphoses provide prodigious leaven for the imagination: 'The magnificent imagination which flows through the drawings of Victor Hugo like the mystery in the sky' (Baudelaire).

It seems to me that the desire to make art produces an ongoing experience of longing, a restlessness sometimes, but not inevitably, played out romantically, or sexually. Always there seems something ahead, the next poem or story, visible, at least, apprehensible, but unreachable. To perceive it at all is to be haunted by it; some sound, some tone, becomes a torment- the poem embodying that sound seems to exist somewhere already finished. It's like a lighthouse, except that, as one swims toward it, it backs away. That's my sense of the poem's beginning. What follows is a period of more concentrated work, so called because as long as one is working the thing itself is wrong or unfinished: a failure. Still, this engagement is absorbing as nothing else I have ever in my life known. And then the poem is finished, and at the moment, instantly detached: it becomes what it was first perceived to be, a thing always in existence. No record exists of the poet's agency. And the poet, from that point, isn't a poet anymore, simple someone who wishes to be one.

Lighthouses Hot summer days ..... or - subtle breezes during Cool summer nights (An apricot sun) ..... or - a platinum moon, with its trailing veil of pale Ecru hued moon dust, the color of eggshell At night, we lay outside on blankets atop blades of grass ..... and - we love and we laugh Only pausing to gaze at the stars (Towards which, we raise up our arms) ..... and - hold out our flicked lighters As if they are, lighthouses Excerpt from: Jacob's Ascent, New Collected Poems by Mekael © Mekael Shane 2024

You're my love, you're my lighthouse; and the sea is rough and in the dark days.

You're my love, you're my lighthouse; and the sea is rough in the dark days.

Inclined in the afternoons I throw my sad nets to your ocean eyes. There it strains and blazes in the highest bonfire, my loneliness, flailing arms like a shipwrecked sailor. I make red signals over your eyes, absent, which swell like the sea at the shore of a lighthouse.

whether identity is a matter of ‘substance’ or ‘consciousness’.55 Although he does not use the term, Greene believed in identity of substance, in there being an essential self. Greene saw Mrs Dalloway, for example, not as a novel with realized characters but as a mere ‘prose poem’.56 In his view, this was not only an intellectual difference between Woolf’s beliefs and his, but a failure of craft – her characters are defective because ontologically adrift. Of course, in pursuing such a point, Greene undermined his claim to be a novelist who happened to be a Catholic: his Catholicism was here shaping his sense of the novel. As a side note, it is worth observing that Greene did not simply dismiss Woolf – he thought highly of To the Lighthouse.57

Suddenly he recalled long-forgotten words, lines from a poem—Donne, wasn’t it? Who is as safe as we where none can do / Treason to us, except one of we two. Even when he was warmed by her naked flesh, treason slithered like a snake into his mind and lay there heavily coiled, somnolent but unshiftable.