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Fear was my father, Father Fear. His look drained the stones.

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
Look
Looks
Drained
Stones
Fear
Father

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The poet: would rather eat a heart than a hambone.
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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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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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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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You must believe: a poem is a holy thing - a good poem, that is. The poem, even a short time after being written, seems no miracle unwritten, it seems something beyond the capacity of the gods.
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By daily dying, I have come to be.
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Art is our defense against hysteria and death.
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The visible exhausts me. I am dissolved in shadow.
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All lovers live by longing, and endure: Summon a vision and declare it pure.
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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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And soon a branch, part of a hidden scene,The leafy mind, that long was tightly furled,Will turn its private substance into green,And young shoots spread upon our inner world.
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How body from spirit slowly does unwind, until we are pure spirit at the end.
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The self says, I am The heart says, I am less The spirit says, you are Nothing.
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Love is not love until love's vulnerable.
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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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Reason? That dreary shed, that hutch for grubby schoolboys.
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I am overwhelmed by the beautiful disorder of poetry, the eternal virginity of words.
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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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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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