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I lose and find myself in the long water. I am gathered together once more.

Theodore Roethke

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Theodore Roethke
Age: 55 †
Born: 1908
Born: May 25
Died: 1963
Died: August 1
Poet
Teacher
Writer
Saginaw
Michigan
Water
Together
Find
Long
Gathered
Lose
Loses

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A too explicit elucidation in education destroys much of the pleasure of learning. There should be room for sly hinters, masters of suggestion.
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How terrible the need for God.
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Time marks us while we are marking time.
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We think by feeling. What is there to know?
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The stones were sharp, The wind came at my back Walking along the highway, Mincing like a cat.
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What have I done, dear God, to deserve this perpetual feeling that I'm almost ready to begin something really new?
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When I go mad, I call my friends by phone: I am afraid they might think they're alone.
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In the kingdom of bang and blab.
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But when I breath with the birds, The spirit of wrath becomes the spirit of blessings, And the dead begin from their dark to sing in my sleep.
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And I walked, I walked through the light air I moved with the morning.
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Death was not. I lived in a simple drowse:Hands and hair moved through a dream of wakening blossoms.Rain sweetened the cave and the dove still calledThe flowers leaned on themselves, the flowers in hollowsAnd love, love sang toward.
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I always felt mean, jogging back over the logging road,As if I had broken the natural order of things in that swamplandDisturbed some rhythm, old and of vast importance,By pulling off flesh from the living planetAs if I had committed, against the whole scheme of life, a desecration.
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So much of adolescence is an ill-defined dying, An intolerable waiting, A longing for another place and time, Another condition.
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What is madness but nobility of soul at odds with circumstance?
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I am overwhelmed by the beautiful disorder of poetry, the eternal virginity of words.
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Fear was my father, Father Fear. His look drained the stones.
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I learn by going where I have to go.
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In a dark time, the eye begins to see / I meet my shadow in the deepening shade...Dark, dark my light, and darker my desire.
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Pain wanders through my bones like a lost fire
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A terrible violence of creation,A flash into the burning heart of the abominableYet if we wait, unafraid, beyond the fearful instant,The burning lake turns into a forest pool,The fire subsides into rings of water,A sunlit silence.
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