“A long night I spent
thinking that reality was the story
of the human species
the vanquished search for the vanquished”
—Etel Adnan (1925–2021)
“Every drop of water has inside it the strange mad longing to be the ocean.”
—Robert Bly (1926–2021)
“I look at the night sky and wonder, my love, if your inquisitive spirit
is soaring through the planets like the mind astronaut you always were.”
—Laura Boss (1938–2021)
“de simple tings of life, mi dear
de simple tings of life
she rocked the rhythms in her chair
brushed a hand across her hair
miles of travel in her stare”
—Jean “Binta” Breeze (1956–2021)
“I had come to believe what’s beautiful
had more to do with daring
to take yourself seriously, to stay
the course, whatever the course might be.”
—Stephen Dunn (1939–2021)
“In the soft evening air
It was hard to believe
There was nothing in front of us
But the enemy and death”
—Herbert Engelhardt (1925–2021)
“The world is a beautiful place
to be born into
if you don’t mind happiness
not always being
so very much fun”
—Lawrence Ferlinghetti (1919–2021)
“we’ll raise the curtain fill the house start the engines
fly off into the sunrise, the spire of the empire state
the last sight on the horizon as the earth begins to curve”
—Robert Hershon (1936–2021)
“When we drop fear, we can draw nearer to people, we can draw nearer to the earth, we can draw nearer to all the heavenly creatures that surround us.”
—bell hooks (1952–2021)
“Soon, while I dream, will step
And stir the sunken dawn.”
—Thomas Kinsella (1928–2021)
“the nerving and dancing and in the foliage in which we sat his
heart (his shadow) that beat for me, every cornerlet of
earth every hedge-row hillock flower of the poet : warm
ash”
—Friederike Mayröcker (1924–2021)
“Today & tomorrow
& the day after that,
you remain evergreen
& ours
somewhere not here,
as my tears land
in potted soil exiled
from its mother, Earth,
like me.”
—Kamilah Aisha Moon (1973–2021)
“only this
Thing standing between you and the place you were headed”
—David Wagoner (1926–2021)
“I think people bundle a name with them from place to place
in a basement, a bottle
of wind
a bottle of turn-it-over
I have so much holler in me”
—Daneen Wardrop (1952–2021)
“I once again knew nothing. The darkness
of daily wanderings resumed, the day's sweet darkness,
the darkness of the voice that counts and measures,
remembers and forgets.”
—Adam Zagajewski (1945–2021)