A Poet Reflects

dreaminginthedeepsouth:

“This place is a dream. Only a sleeper considers it real. Then death comes like dawn, and you wake up laughing at what you thought was your grief.”

—Rumi

(Source: samsaranmusing)

Though lovers be lost love shall not;
And death shall have no dominion.

—Dylan Thomas, from “And Death Shall Have No Dominion,” in The Poems of Dylan Thomas (New Directions, 1971)

“We all die. The goal isn’t to live forever, the goal is to create something that will.” 

—Chuck Palahniuk, from Diary (Doubleday, 2003)

Inside, our songs said life
was sad except for love,
which was everywhere,
like pain.  Love hard
and die young, one sang,
so we pulled our women
closer and drove fast
to a river with a moon,
an arch of cottonwoods,
and the cicada’s harsh
complaint.  Flesh was easy
but death was distant
as the spaces mirrored
in our laminated hoods.

 … and saw how metal lay
in moonlight like sequins.
We spoke no more of love
or the other thing.  And I
remember in the almost quiet
night the sudden strangeness
of our sleek and singing cars.

—B. H. Fairchild, excerpts from “Cars” in The Arrival of the Future (Alice James Books, 2002)

“I was something that lay under the sun and felt it, like the pumpkins, and I did not want to be anything more. I was entirely happy. Perhaps we feel like that when we die and become part of something entire, whether it is sun and air, or goodness and knowledge. At any rate, that is happiness; to be dissolved into something complete and great. When it comes to one, it comes as naturally as sleep.”

—Willa Cather, from My Antonia (Houghton Mifflin, 1918)

Tenderness and resolution
What is our life without a sudden pillow—
What is death without a ditch?

—Hart Crane, opening lines to “Tenderness and Resolution” from Complete Poems of Hart Crane (Liveright, 1986)

j2parman:

“I do not believe that death is man’s real problem or that an art that is entirely permeated by it is completely authentic. Our real issue is growing old, that aspect of death that we experience daily. Perhaps not even growing old but the fact that it is so completely, so terribly cut off from beauty. Our gradual dying does not disturb us, it is rather that the beauty of life becomes inaccessible to us.”

—Witold Gombrowicz, Diary (Yale University Press, 2012)