Photograph by Sally Mann
My little beast, my eyes, my favorite stolen egg.
Listen.
To live is to be marked.
To live is to change,
to acquire the words of a story, a
nd that is the only celebration we mortals really know.
In perfect stillness, frankly, I’ve only found sorrow.
– Barbara Kingsolver
From The Poisonwood Bible
Photograph by Steve McCurry
A great fire burns within me,
but no-one stops to warm themselves at it
and passers-by only see a wisp of smoke.
- Vincent Van Gogh
Photograph by Valeria Cammareri
I wondered if that was how forgiveness budded;
not with the fanfare of epiphany,
but with pain gathering its things,
packing up,
and slipping away unannounced
in the middle of the night.
- Khaled Hosseini
From The Kite Runner
Photograph by Kamil Kotarba
Eventually something you love is going to be taken away.
And then you will fall to the floor crying.
And then, however much later, it is finally happening to you:
you’re falling to the floor crying thinking,
“I am falling to the floor crying,”
but there’s an element of the ridiculous to it —
you knew it would happen and, even worse,
while you’re on the floor crying
you look at the place where the wall meets the floor
and you realize you didn’t paint it very well.
- Richard Siken
Photograph by Han Chengli
Wishing is okay,
but asking is faster.
- Pat Palmer
From Liking Myself, a children’s book
Photograph by Zakir Hossain Chowdhury
If you are in the garden, I will dress myself in leaves.
If you are in the sea I will slide into that smooth blue nest,
I will talk fish,
I will adore salt.
- Mary Oliver
From section 7 of “Rhapsody,” in The Leaf and The Cloud: A Poem
Photograph by William Albert Allard
A hand is shaped for what it holds or makes.
Time takes what's handed to it then - warm bread, a stone,
a child whose fingers touch the page to keep her place.
Beloved, grown old separately, your face
shows me the changes on my own.
I see the histories it holds, the argument it makes
against the thresh of trees, the racing clouds, the race
of birds and sky birds always lose:
the lines have ranged, but not the cheek's strong bone.
My finger touching there recall that place.
Once we were one. Then what time did, and hands, erased
us from the future we had owned.
For some, the future holds what hands release, not made.
We make a bridge. We walked it. Laced
night's sounds with passion.
Owls' pennywhistles, after, took our place.
Wasps leave their nest. Wind takes the papery case.
Our wooden house, less easily undone,
now houses others. A life is shaped by what it holds or makes.
I make these words for what they can't replace
- Jane Hirshfield
From Come, Thief
Photograph by Ning Kai and Sabrina Scarpa
Everyone now and again wonders about
those questions that have no ready
answer: first cause, God’s existence,
what happens when the curtain goes
down and nothing stops it, not kissing
not going to the mall, not the Super
Bowl.
“Wild roses,” I said to them one morning.
“Do you have the answers? And if you do,
would you tell me?”
The roses laughed softly. “Forgive us,”
they said. “But as you can see, we are
just now entirely busy being roses.”
- Mary Oliver
Photograph by Regine Petersen
My heart is so small
it's almost invisible.
How can You place
such big sorrows in it?
"Look," He answered,
"your eyes are even smaller,
yet they behold the world."
- Rumi
Photograph by Richard Misrach
Stress is basically a disconnection from the earth,
a forgetting of the breath.
Stress is an ignorant state.
It believes that everything is an emergency.
Nothing is that important.
Just lie down.
- Natalie Goldberg
Photograph by Vivian Maier
As I turned over the last page, after many nights, a wave of sorrow enveloped me.
Where had they all gone, these people who had seemed so real?
To distract myself, I walked out into the night;
instinctively, I lit a cigarette.
In the dark, the cigarette glowed, like a fire lit by a survivor.
But who would see this light, this small dot among the infinite stars?
I stood a while in the dark, the cigarette glowing and growing small,
each breath patiently destroying me.
How small it was, how brief.
Brief, brief, but inside me now,
which the stars could never be.
- Louise Glück
Photograph by Niki Boon
When I was young
I could speak to animals,
these days
I don't know what to say.
They used to sniff my ears,
but now
they smell my fear
and walk away.
- Kate Tempest
Photograph by Humberto Rivas
I am so tired of waiting.
Aren’t you,
for the world to become good
and beautiful and kind?
Let us take a knife
and cut the world in two —
and see what worms are eating
at the rind.
- Langston Hughes
Photograph by Megan Axelsson
I need you to understand something.
I wrote this for you.
I wrote this for you and only you.
Everyone else who reads it, doesn’t get it.
They may think they get it, but they don’t.
This is the sign you’ve been looking for.
You were meant to read these words.
- Iain S. Thomas
From I Wrote This for You
There's a boy in you about three
Years old who hasn't learned a thing for thirty
Thousand years. Sometimes it's a girl.
This child had to make up its mind
How to save you from death. He said things like:
"Stay home. Avoid elevators. Eat only elk."
You live with this child, but you don't know it.
You're in the office, yes, but live with this boy
At night. He's uninformed, but he does want
To save your life. And he has. Because of this boy
You survived a lot. He's got six big ideas.
Five don't work. Right now he's repeating them to you
- Robert Bly
From Morning Poems
Photograph by Carmen R. Andrews
We cast a shadow on something wherever we stand,
and it is no good moving from place to place to save things;
because the shadow always follows.
Choose a place where you won't do harm -
yes, choose a place where you won't do very much harm,
and stand in it for all you are worth, facing the sunshine.
- E.M. Forster
From A Room with a View
Photograph by Mary Ellen Mark
I ask them to take a poem
and hold it up to the light
like a color slide
or press an ear against its hive.
I say drop a mouse into a poem
and watch him probe his way out,
or walk inside the poem’s room
and feel the walls for a light switch.
I want them to waterski
across the surface of a poem
waving at the author’s name on the shore.
But all they want to do
is tie the poem to a chair with rope
and torture a confession out of it.
They begin beating it with a hose
to find out what it really means.
- Billy Collins
Photograph by Cesar Lechowick
It is not that you want
to be the one to make prints
in the untrampled snow
It is that you want
to be in the snow
without having touched it
to be of the snow
not beginning
Everywhere commerce
dictates the shapes
that move you along
that seat you at the table
far from the snow
far from the act
of not touching
It only gets worse
A girl’s gotta eat
And your hunger’s
not even your own
- Heather Christle
Photograph by Ivo Mayr.
Home, imagined, comes to be.
It is real, earlier than any other place,
but you can’t get to it unless your people show you how to imagine it—
whoever your people are.
They may not be your relatives.
They may never have spoken your language.
They may have been dead for a thousand years.
They may be nothing but words printed on paper,
ghosts of voices, shadows of minds.
But they can guide you home.
They are your human community.
- Ursula Le Guin
From The Operating Instructions
Photograph by Jeremy Pollard.
The world is violent and mercurial--
it will have its way with you.
We are saved only by love--
love for each other
and the love that we pour into the art
we feel compelled to share:
being a parent; being a writer;
being a painter; being a friend.
We live in a perpetually burning building,
and what we must save from it, all the time, is love.
- Tennessee Williams