I poise the pen and it puts forth twigs and leaves, it is covered with blossoms and the scent of that tree is impudent, for there, on the real earth, such trees do not grow...

...and like an insult to suffering humanity is the scent of that tree...

- Czeslaw Milosz, The Poor Poet

Neruda "If you forget me"

On the day the world ends a bee circles a clover, a fisherman mends a glimmering net...

- Czeslaw Milosz, A Song on the End of the World

Japanese Fisherman Song

...What is the earth for them? A lake of darkness. It has been swallowed by the night forever...

- Czeslaw Milosz, The Bird Kingdom

...Jugs of gold, red wine is being poured in aspen copper. And an airborne coach carries gifts for the invisible kings or for the bears...

- Czeslaw Milosz, The Excursion to the Forest

Shakahachi, Japanese Meditation Bowl and Flute

Hope is with you when you believe the earth is not a dream but living flesh...

...That sight, touch, and hearing do not lie,
That all things you have ever seen here
Are like a garden looked at from a gate

You cannot enter...

- Czeslaw Milosz, Hope

Ralph Vaughan Williams

See the long shadow that is cast by the tree? We and the flowers throw shadows on the earth. What has no shadow has no strength to live...

- Czeslaw Milosz, Faith

Missa Criolla, Jose Carreras, Kyrie

On a poppy seed is a tiny house, dogs bark at the poppy-seed moon, and never, never do those poppy-seed dogs imagine that somewhere there is a world much larger...

- Czeslaw Milosz, A Parable of the Poppy

Gustav Holst, Venus

...it has the colour that lily pads have in very deep water when you pluck them in the light of a summer evening...

- Czeslaw Milosz, The Gate

Islands are animals falling asleep, in the nest of the lake they settle down, purring; above them, a narrow cloud...

- Czeslaw Milosz, The Song

It's not the riddle of desire that interests me: it is the riddle of good hands, chervil in a windowbox, the white pages of a book, someone says I'm tired, someone turning on the light...

- Robert Hass, Santa Lucia

Sun, sunflower, coltsfoot on the roadside, a goldfinch, the sign that says Yield, her hair, cat's eyes, his hunger and a yellow bicycle....

- Robert Hass, The Yellow Bicycle

Cartas Amarillas, Nino Bravo

All the new thinking is about loss. In this it resembles all the old thinking...

- Robert Hass, Meditation at Lagunitas

Saddest Song

I know that I know myself no more than a seed curled in the dark of a winged pod knows flourishing...

- Robert Hass, In Weather

Japanese flute

The poet is a monarch of the clouds...

- Robert Hass, The Nineteenth Century as a Song

...sedge, flag, owl's clover, rotting wharves...

- Robert Hass, Palo Alto:The Marshes

Bluegrass

The air stings like autumn, clarifies like pain...

- Robert Hass, Palo Alto; The Marshes

The eyes of fish. The land shimmers fearfully...

- Robert Hass, Palo Alto: The Marshes

Mud, roots, old cartridges, blood. High overhead, the long silence of the geese...

- Robert Hass, Palo Alto: The Marshes

Boat-tailed grackles and white-winged doves...

- Robert Hass, The Apple Trees of Olema

Boat-tailed grackles

... I begin to understand why people would want to carry a body to the river's edge and build a platform of wood and burn it in the wind and scatter the ashes in the river. As if to say, take him, fire, take him, air, and river, take him. Downstream. Downstream...

- Robert Hass, The Apple trees of Olema

Miserere, Allegri

...how brief the time is on a summer afternoon when the sun is warm on your neck and the world might as well be a dog sleeping on a porch, or a child for whom an afternoon is endless, endless...

Time: thick honey, and no one saying goodbye.

- Robert Hass, The Apple Trees of Olema

Every new poem is like finding a new bride. Words are so erotic, they never tire of their coupling...

- Stanley Kunitz

Gypsy wedding song

Poetry is a zoo in which you keep demons and angels...

- Les Murray

Camille Saint Saens "Danse Macabre"

And the days are not full enough...And the nights are not full enough...And life slips by like a field mouse...Not shaking the grass...

- Ezra Pound

Poetry can tell us what human beings are. It can tell us why we stumble and fall and how, miraculously, we can stand up...

- Maya Angelou

I peel and portion a tangerine and spit the pips and feel the drunkenness of things being various...

- Louis Mac Niece

Poems come out of wonder, not out of knowing...

- Lucille Clifton

They Thought I was Asleep, Paul Kelly