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Breathe the sweetness that hovers in August.

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
Hovers
August
Sweetness
Breathe

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And our dreams, with what frivolity we have pared them like toenails, clipped them like ends of split hair.
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The world is not with us enough. O taste and see.
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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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Mountain, mountain, mountain, marking time. Each nameless, wall beyond wall, wavering redefinition of horizon.
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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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You can live for years next door to a big pine tree, honored to have so venerable a neighbor, even when it sheds needles all over your flowers or wakes you, dropping big cones onto your deck at still of night.
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Every day, every day I hear enough to fill a year of nights with wondering.
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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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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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The artist must create himself or be born again.
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Images split the truth in fractions.
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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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Love is a landscape the long mountains define but don't shut off from the unseeable distance.
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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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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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Peace as a positive condition of society, not merely as an interim between wars, is something so unknown that it casts no images on the mind's screen.
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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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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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Each part of speech a spark awaiting redemption, each a virtue, a power in abeyance.
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