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Let me walk through the fields of paper touching with my wand dry stems and stunted butterflies.

Denise Levertov

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Denise Levertov
Age: 74 †
Born: 1923
Born: October 24
Died: 1997
Died: December 20
Poet
Translator
Writer
Ilford
London
Priscilla D Levertoff
Priscilla Denise Levertoff
Priscilla Denise Levertov
Stem
Butterfly
Dry
Touching
Stunted
Fields
Wand
Paper
Wands
Walk
Stems
Walks
Butterflies

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Insofar as poetry has a social function it is to awaken sleepers by other means than shock.
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The fire in leaf and grass so green it seems each summer the last summer.
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Wear scarlet! Tear the green lemons off the tree! I don't want to forget who I am, what has burned in me, and hang limp and clean, an empty dress -
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Images split the truth in fractions.
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Mountain, mountain, mountain, marking time. Each nameless, wall beyond wall, wavering redefinition of horizon.
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Love is a landscape the long mountains define but don't shut off from the unseeable distance.
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Two girls discover the secret of life in a sudden line of poetry.
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blue bead on the wick, there's that in me that burns and chills, blackening my heart with its soot, I think sometimes not Apollo heard me but a different god.
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Praise the invisible sun burning beyond the white cold sky, giving us light and the chimney's shadow.
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In the dark I rest, unready for the light which dawns day after day, eager to be shared. Black silk, shelter me. I need more of the night before I open eyes and heart to illumination. I must still grow in the dark like a root not ready, not ready at all.
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An absolute patience. Trees stand up to their knees in fog. The fog slowly flows uphill. White cobwebs, the grass leaning where deer have looked for apples. The woods from brook to where the top of the hill looks over the fog, send up not one bird. So absolute, it is no other than happiness itself, a breathing too quiet to hear.
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The artist must create himself or be born again.
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One of the obligations of the writer is to say or sing all that he or she can, to deal with as much of the world as becomes possible to him or her in language.
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Every day, every day I hear enough to fill a year of nights with wondering.
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I like to find what's not found at once, but lies within something of another nature, in repose, distinct.
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In certain ways writing is a form of prayer.
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The vast silence of Buddha overtakes and overrules the oncoming roar of tragic life that fills alleys and avenues it blocks the way of pedicabs, police, convoys.
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Beespittle, droppings, hairs of beefur: all become honey. Virulent micro-organisms cannot survive in honey.
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our nerve filaments twitch with its presence day and night, nothing we say has not the husky phlegm of it in the saying, nothing we do has the quickness, the sureness, the deep intelligence living at peace would have.
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There is no savor more sweet, more salt than to be glad to be what, woman, and who, myself, I am.
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