Quote

The fields stretch out in long unbroken rows. We walk aware of what is far and close. Here distance is familiar as a friend. The feud we kept with space comes to an end.

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
Walk
Unbroken
Friend
Stretch
Walks
Familiar
Space
Kept
Comes
Aware
Ends
Distance
Feud
Long
Fields
Feuds
Close
Rows

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In this place of light: he dares to live Who stops being a bird, yet beats his wings Against the immense immeasurable emptiness of things.
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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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A mind too active is no mind at all.
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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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I lose and find myself in the long water. I am gathered together once more.
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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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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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The indignity of it!- With everything blooming above me, Lilies, pale-pink cyclamen, roses, Whole fields lovely and inviolate,- Me down in the fetor of weeds, Crawling on all fours, Alive, in a slippery grave.
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The living all assemble! What's the cue?-- Do what the clumsy partner wants to do!
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Who rise from flesh to spirit know the fall: The word outleaps the world, and light is all.
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What falls away is always. And is near.
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We think by feeling. What is there to know?
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I have gone into the waste lonely places
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Reason? That dreary shed, that hutch for grubby schoolboys.
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Let others probe the mystery if they can.Time-harried prisoners of Shall and Will -The right thing happens to the happy man.
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I wish I could find an event that meant as much as simple seeing.
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Fear was my father, Father Fear. His look drained the stones.
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The poet: would rather eat a heart than a hambone.
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I came where the river Ran over stones My ears knew An early joy. And all the waters Of all the streams Sang in my veins That summer day.
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