Tag: poetry month

“The birds sang their blank melody outside.”

“There is nothing staid, nothing
settled in this universe.
All is rippling, all is
dancing; all is quickness and triumph.”

“I would rather
be loved,
I would rather be famous
than follow perfection
through the sand.”

“I am this,
that
and the other.”

“Yes;
I will reduce you
to order.”

“I am rooted, but I flow.”

“I am not single and entire
as you are.
I have lived a thousand lives
already. Every day I unbury–
I dig up. I find relics
of myself in the sand that
women made thousands of years ago . . .”

“The weight of the world
is on our shoulders.
This is life.”

“I do not wish
to be a man who sits
for fifty years
on the same spot thinking
of his navel. I wish to be
harnessed to a cart, a vegetable cart
that rattles over the cobbles.”

“I have reached
the summit
of my desires.”

“I desired always
to stretch the night and
fill it fuller and fuller
with dreams.”

“There is no repetition for me.
Each day
is dangerous.”

“. . . we are extinct,
lost
in the abyss
of time,
in the
darkness.”

“We have destroyed
something by our
presence . . .
a world perhaps.”

“I, I, I.”

“But if there are no stories,
what end can there be,
or what beginning?”

“It is strange
how the dead leap out
on us at street corners,
or in dreams.”

“Life
is a dream
surely.”

“For this is
not one life;
nor do I always know
if I am man
or woman . . .
so strange is the contact
of one with another.”

“I said life had been imperfect,
an unfinished
phrase.”

“Life has destroyed me.”

“I begin now
to forget;
I begin to doubt the fixity
of tables, the reality of here
and now, to tap my knuckles smartly
upon the edges of apparently
solid objects and say, ‘Are you hard?’”

“It is strange
that we who are capable
of so much suffering,
should inflict
so much suffering.”

“It is death.
Death is the enemy.”

“The
waves
broke
on
the
shore.”

After I finished reading The Waves by Virginia Woolf, I realized that I needed to meditate more on passages, the construction of prose vs. poetry, and my visceral connection with the text. The above are some of my favorite passages that I thought could work by themselves and with more fragmentation (of lines, spacing, etc.). Also, it’s national poetry month . . .

May Virginia not roll over in her grave and topple my shore with waves of despair.