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I have gone into the waste lonely places

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
Gone
Lonely
Waste
Places

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Love is not love until love's vulnerable.
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Being, not doing, is my first joy.
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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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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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Live in a perpetual great astonishment.
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We think by feeling. What is there to know?
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What falls away is always. And is near.
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Nothing would give up life: Even the dirt keeps breathing a small breath.
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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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What's important? That which is dug out of books, or out of the guts?
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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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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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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.
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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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How terrible the need for God.
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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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I came to love, I came into my own.
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Art is our defense against hysteria and death.
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Reason? That dreary shed, that hutch for grubby schoolboys.
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Fear was my father, Father Fear. His look drained the stones.
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