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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.

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
Wherever
Bush
Leaves
Heavy
Growing
Listless
Call
Studded
Didn
June

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In certain ways writing is a form of prayer.
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slowly the pale dew-beads of light lapped up from flowers can thicken, darken to gold: honey of the human.
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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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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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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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Let me walk through the fields of paper touching with my wand dry stems and stunted butterflies.
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I watch the clouds as I see them in pomp advancing, pursuing the fallen sun.
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Two girls discover the secret of life in a sudden line of poetry.
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The world is not with us enough. O taste and see.
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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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Praise the invisible sun burning beyond the white cold sky, giving us light and the chimney's shadow.
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At Delphi I prayed to Apollo that he maintain in me the flame of the poem and I drank of the brackish spring there.
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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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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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Insofar as poetry has a social function it is to awaken sleepers by other means than shock.
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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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I believe every space and comma is a living part of the poem and has its function, just as every muscle and pore of the body has its function. And the way the lines are broken is a functioning part essential to the life of the poem.
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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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Mountain, mountain, mountain, marking time. Each nameless, wall beyond wall, wavering redefinition of horizon.
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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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