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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.

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
Vietnam
Overtakes
Tragic
Roar
Vast
Alleys
Block
Blocks
Police
Avenues
Silence
Fills
Way
Buddha
Overrules
Life
Temples
Oncoming

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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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Every day, every day I hear enough to fill a year of nights with wondering.
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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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Breathe the sweetness that hovers in August.
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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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The fire in leaf and grass so green it seems each summer the last summer.
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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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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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Mountain, mountain, mountain, marking time. Each nameless, wall beyond wall, wavering redefinition of horizon.
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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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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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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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Beespittle, droppings, hairs of beefur: all become honey. Virulent micro-organisms cannot survive in honey.
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Images split the truth in fractions.
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I watch the clouds as I see them in pomp advancing, pursuing the fallen sun.
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In certain ways writing is a form of prayer.
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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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The threat of world's end is the old threat.
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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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