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J.D. Deutschendorf
717 Cedar Springs Dr
Tuttle, Oklahoma
73089-7937
eagle@jangle.net


  poetry quotes: the soul and its longing

To me the meanest flower that blows can give
Thoughts that do often life too deep for tears.

  -  William Wordsworth


I've known rivers:
I've known rivers ancient as the world and older
than the flow of human blood in human veins.
My soul has grown deep like the rivers.

  -  Langston Hughes


A man and a woman sit near each other;
as they breathe they feed someone we do not know,
someone we know of, whom we have never seen.

  -  Robert Bly


But is there any comfort to be found?
Man is in love and loves what vanishes,
What more is there to say?

  -  William Butler Yeats


Of course there is nothing the matter with the stars
It is my emptiness among them
While they drift farther away in the invisible morning.

  -  W.S. Merwin


Stay with me, God. The night is dark
The night is cold: my little spark
Of courage dies. The night is long;
Be with me, God, and make me strong.

  -  Anonymous
NOTE: The above poem was found on a scrap of paper in a slit trench in Tunisia during the battle of El Aghelia by members of the British Eighth Army.


We have no rivers, we have no wells, we have no springs,
only a few cisterns--and these empty--that echo,
and we worship them.
A stagnant hollow sound, the same as our loneliness
the same as our love, the same as our bodies.

  -  George Seferis   translated by Edmund Keeley & Philip Sherrard


I am not I.
    I am this one
Walking beside me whom I do not see,
Whom at times I manage to visit,
And at other times forget.
The one who remains silent when I talk,
The one who forgives, sweet, when I hate,
The one who takes a walk when I am indoors,
The one who will remain standing when I die.

  -  Juan Ramon Jimenez   translated by Robert Bly


Readers might also enjoy: spring storm


At the day's end
all our footsteps are added up
to see how near.

  -  W.S. Merwin


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Copyright © 2001
by J.D. Deutschendorf