Quote

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.

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
Love
Hair
Sang
Called
Caves
Simple
Flowers
Sweetened
Death
Rain
Hollows
Hands
Moved
Blossoms
Dream
Flower
Leaned
Stills
Toward
Cave
Still
Lived
Dove

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What falls away is always. And is near.
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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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How body from spirit slowly does unwind, until we are pure spirit at the end.
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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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When I go mad, I call my friends by phone: I am afraid they might think they're alone.
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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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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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And I walked, I walked through the light air I moved with the morning.
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How terrible the need for God.
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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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We think by feeling. What is there to know?
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The visible exhausts me. I am dissolved in shadow.
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What's important? That which is dug out of books, or out of the guts?
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What is madness but nobility of soul at odds with circumstance?
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A mind too active is no mind at all.
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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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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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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 learn by going where I have to go.
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