In sleep I am looking for poems in the shape of open V's of birds flying in formation, or open arms saying, I forgive you, all.

— Elizabeth Alexander

Rain is falling falling and memories keep flooding by they show me a senseless world a voracious world—abyss ambush whirlwind spur but I keep loving it because I do because of my five senses because of my amazement because every morning, because forever, I have loved it without knowing why.

Claribel Alegría, from “Rain”, trans. Margaret S. Peden

“Poems are nearer to prayers than to stories, but in poetry there is no one behind the language being prayed to. It is the language itself which has to hear and acknowledge. For the religious poet, the Word is the first attribute of God. In all poetry words are a presence before they are a means of communication.”

— John Berger, My Heart, Brief as Photos.

Take me, wherever you are, Take me, however you are. To be restored to the warmth of face and body, To the light of heart and eye, To the salt of bread and song, To the taste of earth and homeland.

Mahmoud Darwish

Some dreams we lose, some never change. We all know this unnamed yearning, standing in front of doors we have yet to open and those we have closed long ago. Pieces of us remain in this silent space, whilst the surrounding world grows beneath our reach. One day I hope to look back with kindness

Whose version of Mary am I holding?, Mary Szybist

“To make a new world you start with an old one, certainly. To find a world, maybe you have to have lost one. Maybe you have to be lost. The dance of renewal, the dance that made the world, was always danced here at the edge of things, on the brink, on the foggy coast.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin, Dancing at the Edge of the World: Thoughts on Words, Women, Places

Seamus Heaney

Orpheus in Spring - Jenny George

Marina Tsvetaeva,from "My ear attends to you", Selected Poems (trans. Elaine Feinstein, with Maxwell Shorter) [ID'd]

What if we have to return to sound. Not words, but things not things, but splinters, kisses, traces, errant lights and gossamer loves.

No Moon, But

I knew it was

the beekeeper who touched me,

not because she

tasted of honey, 

but because she

was unafraid

of being stung.

-Andrea Cohen

Matias Alonso Revelli

I wrote on the wind The name of my love. I wrote it on the water. I did not know That the wind rushes by without listening, That names dissolve in the water. —Nizar Qabbani, from “The Book of Love,” On Entering the Sea: The Erotic and Other Poetry of Nizar Qabbani (Interlink Pub Group, 2013)

You’re not a creature in body. You exist as the stars exist, participating in their stillness, their immensity.

— Louise Glück, from "Telescope"

Until the stars collapse

you owe it to yourself to quit being the apology. to hold your hand and sing your favorite song. to love another and see how far that will go. to love yourself and forget where you were headed in the first place. love is a funny story. it wakes up and builds a plot. it wakes up and shapes you into the kind of woman your mother studies. i am not per- fect in it. i am not even remotely articulate. but it is big, this love. it is airborne and triumphant. i am no easy show. i hurt like the climb of my lineage. i hurt on purpose. i hurt to not be hurt. no, none of this is an excuse. just a blueprint. a map. come find me when the day is bronze and the sorrow is full. i am building my poem in this here heart. all of it is a working title.

— Tonya Ingram

“You can’t remember what they did to you. Your loneliness isn’t welcome here, you know, but still you walk the dream-lit village, looking for someone gentle enough. There must be an animal trapped under your shirt, you think, because little claws scratch against your chest and you throb there, but you’re afraid to look because looking means remembering.”

— Sara Eliza Johnson, from “Parable of the Unclean Spirit”