Breathe-in experience, breathe-out poetry. ~Muriel Rukeyser

Out of the quarrel with others we make rhetoric; out of the quarrel with ourselves we make poetry. ~W.B. Yeats

There's no money in poetry, but then there's no poetry in money, either. ~Robert Graves 

 Sonnets XI

~Edna Saint Vincent Millay

            As to some lovely temple, tenantless
            Long since, that once was sweet with shivering brass,
            Knowing well its altars ruined and the grass
            Grown up between the stones, yet from excess
            Of grief hard driven, or great loneliness,
            The worshiper returns, and those who pass
            Marvel him crying on a name that was,--
            So is it now with me in my distress.
            Your body was a temple to Delight;
            Cold are its ashes whence the breath is fled,
            Yet here one time your spirit was wont to move;
            Here might I hope to find you day or night,
            And here I come to look for you, my love,
            Even now, foolishly, knowing you are dead.

By the Fire

~Aldous Huxley

    We who are lovers sit by the fire,
    Cradled warm 'twixt thought and will,
    Sit and drowse like sleeping dogs
    In the equipoise of all desire,
    Sit and listen to the still
    Small hiss and whisper of green logs
    That burn away, that burn away
    With the sound of a far-off falling stream
    Of threaded water blown to steam,
    Grey ghost in the mountain world of grey.
    Vapours blue as distance rise
    Between the hissing logs that show
    A glimpse of rosy heat below;
    And candles watch with tireless eyes
    While we sit drowsing here. I know,
    Dimly, that there exists a world,
    That there is time perhaps, and space
    Other and wider than this place,
    Where at the fireside drowsily curled
    We hear the whisper and watch the flame
    Burn blinkless and inscrutable.
    And then I know those other names
    That through my brain from cell to cell
    Echo--reverberated shout
    Of waiters mournful along corridors:
    But nobody carries the orders out,
    And the names (dear friends, your name and yours)
    Evoke no sign. But here I sit
    On the wide hearth, and there are you:
    That is enough and only true.
    The world and the friends that lived in it
    Are shadows: you alone remain
    Real in this drowsing room,
    Full of the whispers of distant rain
    And candles staring into the gloom.

I taught myself to live simply

~Anna Akhmatova
I taught myself to live simply and wisely,
to look at the sky and pray to God,
and to wander long before evening
to tire my superfluous worries.
When the burdocks rustle in the ravine
and the yellow-red rowanberry cluster droops
I compose happy verses
about life's decay, decay and beauty.
I come back. The fluffy cat
licks my palm, purrs so sweetly
and the fire flares bright
on the saw-mill turret by the lake.
Only the cry of a stork landing on the roof
occasionally breaks the silence.
If you knock on my door
I may not even hear.