Frasi di Theodore Roethke

pagina 3

“Tutte le cose finite mostrano infinitezza.”

“La luce la stava ad ascoltare quando ella cantava.”

“In epoca buia, gli occhi cominciano a vedere.”

“L'amore genera amore. Questo tormento è la mia gioia.”

“L'anima è dotata di molteplici movimenti, il corpo di uno solo.”

“Bless me and the maze I'm in!
Hello, thingy spirit.”

“I bleed my bones, their marrow to bestow
Upon that God who knows what I would know.”

“In our age, if a boy or girl is untalented, the odds are in favor of their thinking they want to write.”

“You can't make poetry simply by avoiding clichés.”

“I study the lives on a leaf: the little
Sleepers, numb nudgers in cold dimensions.”

“Goodbye, goodbye, old stones, the time-order is going,
I have married my hands to perpetual agitation,
I run, I run to the whistle of money.
Money money money
Water water water.”

“There's a point where plainness is no longer a virtue, when it becomes excessively bald, wrenched.”

“The mind moved, not alone,
Through the clear air, in the silence.
Was it light?
Was it light within?
Was it light within light?
Stillness becoming alive,
Yet still?”

“To whom does this terrace belong? —
With its limestone crumbling into fine greyish dust,
Its bevy of bees, and its wind-beaten rickety sun-chairs?
Not to me, but this lizard,
Older than I, or the cockroach.”

“I always felt mean, jogging back over the logging road,
As if I had broken the natural order of things in that swampland;
Disturbed some rhythm, old and of vast importance,
By pulling off flesh from the living planet;
As if I had committed, against the whole scheme of life, a desecration.”

“You must believe: a poem is a holy thing — a good poem, that is.”

“Great Nature has another thing to do
To you and me; so take the lively air,
And, lovely, learn by going where to go.”

“And soon a branch, part of a hidden scene,
The leafy mind, that long was tightly furled,
Will turn its private substance into green,
And young shoots spread upon our inner world.”

“I lived with deep roots once:
Have I forgotten their ways —
The gradual embrace
Of lichen around stones?”

“A lively understandable spirit
Once entertained you.
It will come again.
Be still.
Wait.”

“The poem, even a short time after being written, seems no miracle; unwritten, it seems something beyond the capacity of the gods.”

“Being, not doing, is my first joy.”

“Yet for this we travelled
With hope, and not alone,
In the country of ourselves,
In a country of bright stone.”

“Nothing would give up life:
Even the dirt kept breathing a small breath.”

“There's an element of desperation in the insistence of the graduate student's respect for knowledge — as opposed to wisdom.”

“The wasp waits.
The edge cannot eat the center.
The grape listens.
The path tells little to the serpent.
An eye comes out of the wave.
The journey from flesh is longest.
A rose sways least.
The redeemer comes a dark way.”

“This urge, wrestle, resurrection of dry sticks,
Cut stems struggling to put down feet,
What saint strained so much,
Rose on such lopped limbs to a new life?”

“Mother of quartz, your words writhe into my ear.
Renew the light, lewd whisper.”

“God bless the roots!”

“Is pain a promise? I was schooled in pain,
And found out what I could of all desire;
I weep for what I'm like when I'm alone
In the deep center of the voice and fire.I know the motion of the deepest stone.
Each one's himself, yet each one's everyone.”