Mourning Dove Quotes

Funeral Blues Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone, Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone, Silence the pianos and with muffled drum Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come. Let aeroplanes circle moaning overhead Scribbling on the sky the message He is Dead, Put crêpe bows round the white necks of the public doves, Let the traffic policemen wear black cotton gloves. He was my North, my South, my East and West, My working week and my Sunday rest, My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song; I thought that love would last for ever: I was wrong. The stars are not wanted now; put out every one, Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun; Pour away the ocean and sweep up the wood; For nothing now can ever come to any good.

When her doctor took her bandages off and led her into the garden, the girl who was no longer blind saw “the tree with the lights in it.” It was for this tree I searched through the peach orchards of summer, in the forests of fall and down winter and spring for years. Then one day I was walking along Tinker creek and thinking of nothing at all and I saw the tree with the lights in it. I saw the backyard cedar where the mourning doves roost charged and transfigured, each cell buzzing with flame. I stood on the grass with the lights in it, grass that was wholly fire, utterly focused and utterly dreamed. It was less like seeing that like being for the first time see, knocked breathless by a powerful glance. The flood of fire abated, but I’m still spending the power. Gradually the lights went out in the cedar, the colors died, the cells un-flamed and disappeared. I was still ringing. I had been my whole life a bell and never knew it until at that moment I was lifted and struck. I have since only very rarely seen the tree with the lights in it. The vision comes and goes, mostly goes, but I live for it, for the moment the mountains open and a new light roars in spate through the crack, and the mountains slam.

Everything on the earth has a purpose, every disease an herb to cure it, and every person a mission. This is the Indian theory of existence.

She Dwelt Among the Untrodden Ways She dwelt among the untrodden ways Beside the springs of Dove, A Maid whom there were none to praise And very few to love: A violet by a mossy stone Half hidden from the eye! —Fair as a star, when only one Is shining in the sky. She lived unknown, and few could know When Lucy ceased to be; But she is in her grave, and, oh, The difference to me!

Seemed like you could stretch out your arms on either side and touch the mountains. Straight up they went, dark and feathered with treetops, and left a thin slice of stars above us. Way off, a mourning dove called, long and throaty, and the mountains picked it up and echoed the sound over and over, carrying it farther and farther away until you wondered how many mountains and hollows that call would travel--and it died away, so far, it was more like a memory than a sound.

In that brief moment, I understood. The doubt, the hesitation, the mourning of a future I'd never have-it belonged to her as well. Gone was the spitting hellcat. Now, there was only a woman. And she was small. And she was frightened. And she was strong. And she was asking me to be the same.

No lights shone beyond the windows of his room. The reflection from the bedside lamp seemed insubstantial as a candle flame; the darkness outside a solid mass, huge and inescapable, that pressed against the panes. His room sat beneath the eaves, where the wind didn't roar but crooned, a sound like mourning doves.

Every time there was an unspoken promise that this would be the last time, but it would only be the last time until the next time.

Mourning Doves have the same misfortune that pigs have, the misfortune of being delicious.

An idiot will do anything, no matter how stupid, because he is afraid of what everybody will think of him if he does nothing. A genius, on the other hand, is content to do nothing, no matter what people think, if he can’t find anything worth doing.

And now I'm back outside again sitting in the white plastic chair looking at the dew on the gas cap of my car. A fly wants to bit me on the ankle. The mosquitoes are all asleep. They're just not out at this hour. Only one biting fly. And a mourning dove, who blows through his thumbs to make that sound.

She swishes her arms back and forth. “Okay.” Her voice is small and quiet like a mourning dove, like the soft gray on a mourning dove’s back.

When I was younger, my parents used to say I sounded like a mourning dove, always sulking, always so damn sad.

I call on you, Beloved, merge with me in Love, heal this heart and teach me of all we deem Above I lose the I to find You, to drink from Endless Well, the one that seems so far when all we see is shell Pour this jug and fill it, may it overflow, may it run like river Nile, may it forever grow. Who am I without my Home, without my Source, my Love? A wanderer lost in desert land, a bird, but ... Mourning dove I've traveled long and traveled far, seeking you in skin, when all along you've been right here, calling from within

The pale morning sun filters through the forest canopy around us. I imagine my dewy rosebush soaking it up, photosynthesizing like crazy. The coo of a mourning dove echoes, somehow soothing my heart. Sometimes I feel so entangled with the West Virginia seasons, it's like I'm breathing through them.

Never believe what they say; they always lie. I have a saying: Whatever they say, do the opposite, and you’ll never go wrong.

The ring-dove sang from the willow spray, Well-a-day! Well-a-day! He mourn'd for the fate of his darling mate, Well-a-day!

What a blessing life is. If you don’t believe it, get up and watch the sunrise tomorrow or take time to gaze up at the stars. Listen to the restful sound of a mourning dove in the quiet woods, or the wind whispering through the leaves above you. Contemplate all that you are grateful for, and never give up on your dreams. Most importantly, give your whole heart to all that you love in this life.

A certain brother said : “It is right for a man to take up the burden for them who are near to him, whatever it may be, and, so to speak, to put his own soul in the place of that of his neighbour, and to become, if it were possible, a double man, and he must suffer, and weep, and mourn with him, and finally the matter must be accounted by him as if he himself had put on the actual body of his neighbour, and as if he had acquired his countenance and soul, and he must suffer for him as he would for himself.

The Memphis Finley and I landed in was my mother’s Memphis. It was magnolia-lined and manicured, black-tailed and bow-tied. It glittered in illusory gold and tinkled in sing-song voices. It was cloistered, segregated, and well-appointed, the kind of place where everyone monogrammed their initials on everything from hand towels to silver because nothing mattered more than one’s family and to whom they were connected by lineage that traced through the fertile fields of the Mississippi Delta.

In 1968, at fifteen, she turned on the television and watched chaos flaring up across the country like brush fires. Martin Luther King, Jr., then Bobby Kennedy. Students in revolt at Columbia. Riots in Chicago, Memphis, Baltimore, D.C.—everywhere, everywhere, things were falling apart. Deep inside her a spark kindled, a spark that would flare in Izzy years later. Of course she understood why this was happening: they were fighting to right injustices. But part of her shuddered at the scenes on the television screen. Grainy scenes, but no less terrifying: grocery stores ablaze, smoke billowing from their rooftops, walls gnawed to studs by flame. The jagged edges of smashed windows like fangs in the night. Soldiers marching with rifles past drugstores and Laundromats. Jeeps blocking intersections under dead traffic lights. Did you have to burn down the old to make way for the new? The carpet at her feet was soft. The sofa beneath her was patterned with roses. Outside, a mourning dove cooed from the bird feeder and a Cadillac glided to a dignified stop at the corner. She wondered which was the real world.

A car horn startled her, and she knew if she lived here the rest of her life, she'd never get used to the busyness of town life, how something was always coming and going and whatever that something was always had a noise. Not soothing like the sound of a creek or rain on a tin roof or a mourning dove's call, but harsh and grating, no pattern to it, nothing to settle the mind upon. Except in the early morning, those moments before the city waked with all its grime and noise. She could look out the window at the mountains, and their stillness settled inside her like a healing balm

did attend church more regularly. Or I tried. One Sunday when the dreadful bell choir was scheduled, I made it only as far as a courtyard in the gardens where I sat in the moist, cool, gray-May air and watched the mist burn off the mountains while mourning doves hoo-hooed and wild parrots squawked in the deodars. The AUUCC’s historic, once elegant three-acre park was overgrown and shaggy, its hardscape crumbling in places and all the lovelier for it. My soul was fed as richly on that bench as in any hour in the sanctuary. Nor was I the first Sunday garden truant.

But part of her shuddered at the scenes on the television screen. Grainy scenes, but no less terrifying: grocery stores ablaze, smoke billowing from their rooftops, walls gnawed to studs by flame. The jagged edges of smashed windows like fangs in the night. Soldiers marching with rifles past drugstores and Laundromats. Jeeps blocking intersections under dead traffic lights. Did you have to burn down the old to make way for the new? The carpet at her feet was soft. The sofa beneath her was patterned with roses. Outside, a mourning dove cooed from the bird feeder and a Cadillac glided to a dignified stop at the corner. She wondered which was the real world.

In the gutter atop the empty, boarded-up building on my side of the road, Mourning Doves sense my dread and shudder in a cozy nest tucked in the gutter. Their kin have flown to warmer, brighter skies, but they remain my steadfast companions. I’m grateful, though I long to fly, too. But as long as The Bad Man lurks, another girl may need me. As long as The Bad Man lurks, I will stay.

What they couldn’t see, that I could, was that the wild was missing from her eyes. They had already dimmed for the night. She looked more defeated than anything, which weirdly caused another pang to hit my chest. While the crowd recovered from this dramatic threat, Mel was the first to take action. She dove for an unused desk phone, as out of place at this party as me. “I’m calling hotel security,” she announced. “No, please!” I was pleading to both my wife and my henchmen, who had gone mad with sudden onslaught of responsibility. Brent and his bro looked like they were getting ready to corner my wife and tackle her to the floor. “Everybody just leave, so I can administer to my wife.

She saw a perfect feather and held it up to the light. The gray of a mourning dove.

Steris, credo che siamo tutti così. Sballottati da un posto all'altro dal dovere, dalla società o da Dio in persona. Sembra quasi che siamo passeggeri delle nostre stesse vite. Ma ogni tanto ci troviamo di fronte a una scelta. Una vera scelta. Forse non possiamo scegliere cosa ci accade o dove ci fermeremo, ma possiamo decidere di puntare in una direzione". Le strinse forte la mano. "Voi vi siete indirizzata verso di me".

I sat listening to the soulful mourning dove. Summer breezes stirred my hair. The drifting fragrance of lavender filled my head with long-forgotten thoughts.

Do you understand yours? What a blessing life is. If you don’t believe it, get up and watch the sunrise tomorrow or take time to gaze up at the stars. Listen to the restful sound of a mourning dove in the quiet woods, or the wind whispering through the leaves above you. Contemplate all that you are grateful for, and never give up on your dreams. Most importantly, give your whole heart to all that you love in this life.

But does every godly man succeed in forgiving, yes, loving his enemies? Answer: He does so in a gospel sense. That is: (a) In so far as there is assent. He subscribes to it in his judgment as a thing which ought to be done: "with my mind I serve the law of God" (Romans 7:25). (b) In so far as there is grief. A godly man mourns that he can love his enemies no more: "O wretched man that I am!" (Romans 7:24). "Oh, this base cankered heart of mine, that has received so much mercy and can show so little! I have had millions forgiven me—yet I can hardly forgive pence!" (c) In so far as there is prayer. A godly man prays that God will give him a heart to love his enemies. "Lord, pluck this root of bitterness out of me, perfume my soul with love, make me a dove without gall." (d) In so far as there is effort. A godly man resolves and strives in the strength of Christ against all rancor and virulence of spirit. This is in a gospel sense to love our enemies. A wicked man cannot do this; his malice boils up to revenge.

My grandmother said mourning doves bring bad luck.” Another mourning dove lands. “And they always come in twos.” “Your grandmother had a contact buzz from the years you spent growing weed in her basement.” Noah

Leave the mourning to the doves because we will never die.

Tell me your greatest wish,” Dorian murmured into Sorscha’s hair as he entwined their fingers, marveling at the smoothness of her tan skin against the calluses of his. Such pretty hands, like mourning doves.

Because it was time.” I suppressed a sigh of frustration. “Meaning . . . ?” “Meaning there’s a time for mourning, and there’s a time for moving on.

The way he learned to sing was by imitating the songbirds: their warbles and whistles, their scolds. Before his stroke he'd been able to imitate certain notes and melodies of their calls, but never whole songs. I was sitting under the umbrella with him, in early March-March second, the day the Texas Declaration of Independence had been signed, when Grandfather began to sing. A black-and-white warbler had flown in right in front of us and was sitting on a cedar limb, singing-relieved, I think, that we weren't owls. Cedar waxwings moved through the brush behind it, pausing to wipe the bug juice from their bills by rubbing their beaks against branches (like men dabbing their mouths with napkins after getting up from the table). Towhees were hopping all around us, scratching through the cedar duff for pill bugs, pecking, pecking, pecking, and still the vireo stayed right there on that branch, turning its head sideways at us and singing, and Grandfather made one deep sound in his throat-like a stone being rolled away-and then he began to sing back to the bird, not just imitating the warbler's call, but singing a whole warbler song, making up warbler sentences, warbler declarations. Other warblers came in from out of the brush and surrounded us, and still Grandfather kept whistling and trilling. More birds flew in. Grandfather sang to them, too. With high little sounds in his throat, he called in the mourning doves and the little Inca doves that were starting to move into this country, from the south, and whose call I liked very much, a slightly younger, faster call that seemed to complement the eternity-becking coo of the mourning dove. Grandfather sang until dark, until the birds stopped answering his songs and instead went back into the brush to go to roost, and the fireflies began to drift out of the bushes like sparks and the coyotes began to howl and yip. Grandfather had long ago finished all the tea, sipping it between birdsongs to keep his voice fresh, and now he was tired, too tired to even fold the umbrella. .... I was afraid that with the miracle of birdsong, it was Grandfather's last night on earth-that the stars and the birds and the forest had granted him one last gift-and so I drove slowly, wanting to remember the taste, smell, and feel of all of it it, and to never forget it. But when I stopped the truck he seemed rested, and was in a hurry to get out and go join Father, who was sitting on the porch in the dark listening to one of the spring-training baseball games on the radio.

Bina had dressed her in a dove-colored gown, the red embroidery on its sleeves and hem the only decoration that separated it from a mourning dress. Usually she avoided such a bright color, even in ornamentation and especially when she might cross paths with Lisenn. The gray of the dress itself could cause no complaint, but that red might earn her a few bruises. Or another attempt on her life. She didn’t know anymore.

Was it because she was still mourning? Because I was? Because she’d attacked her supper like a rabid animal, because she’d only blinked twice in the past hour? I mentally shook myself, irritated with Beau. With myself. She’d been stranger than usual, yes, but that didn’t justify the way my skin crawled when she touched me.

The mourning dove had returned to the television antenna. He sat there still and perfect as a heraldic bird. I said hoo-hoo to him and got a response, hoo-hoo, and I felt better.

The mind registers trauma in step-by-step increments, lest you become overwhelmed. It is the unadulterated meaning of saving grace, a mechanism within each of us that is far too intelligent to make use of the basic instincts of fight or flight, because it is beyond it. The mind freezes in the critical moment, and waits until you are strong enough to take the next step.

Tongues of Fire This is what's become of us: I am confused by mourning, and he is the sun that goes to sleep on top of me, undone by moonrise. Lover, all I speak is iambs and slant rhyme. That devil lamb of light called hope is sacrificed and none too pleased with having lost its bleat. The stone has rolled away but God's not gone and damn it, I'm no fan of the weather here, it rains too often, bones of doves and angel down until the ground stains red with sighs and blood. It is wet and cold. Will you explain again the why of all there is and how he caught me in the act, discovering God?

Ages before men had lived on the earth, there had been the creatures of the wilderness, and the holes of the rocks and the nests of the trees, and rain, frost, heat, dew, sunlight, and night, storm and calm, the honey of the wild flower and the instinct of the bee-all the beautiful and multiple forms of life with their inscrutable design. To know something of them and to love them was to be close to the kingdom of earth-perhaps to the greater kingdom of heaven. For whatever breathed and moved was a part of that creation. The coo of the dove, the lichen on the mossy rock, the mourn of a hunting wolf, and the murmur of the waterfall, the ever-green and growing tips of the spruces and the thunderbolts along the battlements of the heights-these one and all must be actuated by the Great Spirit-that incalculable thing in the universe that had produced man and soul.

EXEUNT THE VIOLS Listen: even the ocean mourns the passage of voices so pure and penetrant, that insect hum. Who discovered usefulness? Who forgot how to sing, simply? (Magnificence spoke up briefly, followed by the race boat’s break-neck dazzle.)…their last chord a breath drawn deep in a garden maze, there near the statue smiling under the stars.

It was not metabolically possible for me to live; I looked at people replete with constructed circumstance I couldn't believe in, their parallel acceptance of an, at best, flickery narrative. Ill, as they said, or melancholic I, a kind of stressed dove, ever mournful of being born here . . . took myself out of our world, wanting no more . . . words like hopeful, lonely: what could they be to me? Now, I feel nothing—what I always wished when I was alive . . . Why should we have had feelings, anything so clamorous or hurting?

occupying the same stream. They were distinct opposites going through the motions of co-creating a life, but the gossamer veneer of their marriage started to shred the day my father impulsively quit his job as vice president of a bank in Minneapolis. One hundred thousand dollars from a deceased aunt I’d never heard of must have seemed like a lifetime cushion to my father, but when he shared the news with my mother, Finley and I heard the ballistic reverberation in every room of the house.

even though I sit in the last row with no one else around me, I am not alone. I feel the energy that has sidled up to the empty seat beside me, and I understand immediately that this is not a person but a thing called Grief. Like a masher trying to put the moves on, Grief inches closer and closer, and though I am terribly intimidated, I lie low, hold my breath, and continue to look straight ahead. The thing is, though, I know that none of this matters—I have finally been caught, and Grief, like the sound of the mourning dove, will continue to stalk me wherever I go. Because, no matter how clever my hiding space, from now on, I will always be in plain sight.

Someone has been sawing off all the branches of the tree outside my dining room window. I like to sit in my T-shirt and panties at the dining room table first thing in the morning and listen to the uneaten mourning doves and write. The branches covered virtually the entire window and prevented the neighbors from seeing me sitting here in my underwear. But now the branches are coming away one by one and revealing me to my neighbors slowly like a puzzle taking shape.

SPECULATION In the coolness here I care Not for the down-pressed noises overhead, I hear in my pearly bone the wear Of marble under the rain; nothing is truly dead, There is only the wearing away, The changing of means. Nor eyes I have To tell how in the summer the mourning dove Rocks on the hemlock’s arm, nor ears to rend The sad regretful mind With the call of the horned lark. I lie so still that the earth around me Shakes with the weight of day; I do not mind if the vase Holds decomposed cut flowers, or if they send One of their kind to tidy up. Such play I have no memories of, Nor of the fire-bush flowers, or the bark Of the rough pine where the crows With their great haw and flap Circle in kinned excitement when a wind blows. I am kin with none of these, Nor even wed to the yellowing silk that splits; My sensitive bones, which dreaded, As all the living do, the dead, Wait for some unappointed pattern. The wits Of countless centuries dry in my skull and overhead I do not heed the first rain out of winter, Nor do I care what they have planted. At my center The bone glistens; of wondrous bones I am made; And alone shine in a phosphorous glow, So, in this little plot where I am laid.

It was cloistered, segregated, and well-appointed, the kind of place where everyone monogrammed their initials on everything from hand towels to silver because nothing mattered more than one’s family and to whom they were connected by lineage that traced through the fertile fields of the Mississippi Delta.

Your heart breaks only once in a lifetime. Every offense in its wake is only a variation of the original laceration. Only once can you say you have no frame of reference. Only once are you knocked to your knees by an intractable powerlessness, where the only option is surrender in listless defeat. Subsequent infractions are damaging in their own right, but they’re only a visitation of the original wound, which remains half-healed forever, with scar tissue that defines you for the rest of your life.

There’s a time for mourning, and there’s a time for moving on.

What is the fire of inspiration that resides within, if not something to follow along a path?