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Praise the invisible sun burning beyond the white cold sky, giving us light and the chimney's shadow.

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
Cold
Chimneys
White
Burning
Light
Invisible
Giving
Sky
Praise
Shadow
Sun
Beyond
Chimney

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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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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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Let me walk through the fields of paper touching with my wand dry stems and stunted butterflies.
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Hypocrite women, how seldom we speak of our own doubts, while dubiously we mother man in his doubt!
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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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Do you mistake me? I am speaking of living, of moving from one moment into the next, and into the one after, breathing death in the spring air.
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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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I watch the clouds as I see them in pomp advancing, pursuing the fallen sun.
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In June the bush we call alder was heavy, listless, its leaves studded with galls, growing wherever we didn't want it.
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There's in my mind a... turbulent moon-ridden girl or old woman, or both, dressed in opals and rags, feathers and torn taffeta, who knows strange songs but she is not kind.
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Mediocrity is perhaps due not so much to lack of imagination as to lack of faith in the imagination, lack of the capacity for this abandon.
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Let the space under the first storey be dark, let the water lap the stone posts, and vivid green slime glimmer upon them let a boat be kept there.
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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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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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A poet articulating the dreads and horrors of our time is necessary in order to make readers understand what is happening, really understand it, not just know about it but feel it: and should be accompanied by a willingness on the part of those who write it to take additional action towards stopping the great miseries which they record.
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What joy when the insouciant armadillo glances at us and doesn't quicken his trotting across the track into the palm brush. What is this joy? That no animal falters, but knows what it must do?
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Breathe the sweetness that hovers in August.
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I'll dig in into my days, having come here to live, not to visit. Grey is the price of neighboring with eagles, of knowing a mountain's vast presence, seen or unseen.
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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 world is not with us enough. O taste and see.
Denise Levertov