Quote

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.

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
Terrible
Pool
Sunlit
Silence
Forests
Abominable
Violence
Rings
Unafraid
Fire
Instant
Lake
Waiting
Burning
Forest
Turns
Wait
Fearful
Water
Creation
Lakes
Heart
Beyond
Flash
Subsides

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The visible exhausts me. I am dissolved in shadow.
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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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What falls away is always. And is near.
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And I walked, I walked through the light air I moved with the morning.
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I learn by going where I have to go.
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How body from spirit slowly does unwind, until we are pure spirit at the end.
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Love is not love until love's vulnerable.
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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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Time marks us while we are marking time.
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What's important? That which is dug out of books, or out of the guts?
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We think by feeling. What is there to know?
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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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Nothing would give up life: Even the dirt keeps breathing a small breath.
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I came to love, I came into my own.
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Live in a perpetual great astonishment.
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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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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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Long live the weeds that overwhelm My narrow vegetable realm! The bitter rock, the barren soil That force the son of man to toil All things unholy, marred by curse, The ugly of the universe.
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