If you love this land of the free, bring them home, bring them home, Bring them back from overseas.
I like the dance between sustained focus and digression that the long poem invites. A controlling metaphor helps to sustain the long poem.
I don't know much about death and the sorriest lesson I've learned is that words, my most trusted guardians against chaos, offer small comfort in the face of anyone's dying.
I've been accused of darkness by my inner light.
As deaths have accumulated I have begun to think of life and death as a set of balance scales. When one is young, the scale is heavily tipped toward the living. With the first death, the first consciousness of death, the counter scale begins to fall. Death by death, the scales shift weight until what was unthinkable becomes merely a matter of gravity and the fall into death becomes an easy step.
It's extremely important that, as writers, we give a voice to those who don't have voices, including the other animals that we share the planet with and the places that are endangered or being lost.
There are landscapes and species that are not going to be here a hundred years from now, fifty years from now. One gift we as writers give to the world is to bear witness to these landscapes and species as we have experienced them.
Art, like love, excludes all competition and absorbs the man.
In those happy days when leisure was held to be no sin, men and women wrote journals whose copiousness both delights and dismays us.
The main source of our wealth is goodness. The affections and the generous qualities that God admires in a world full of greed.
To look this way is to see. To see is to have vision. To have vision is to understand. To understand is to know. To know is to become. To become is to live fully. To live fully is to matter. And to matter is to become light. And to become light is to be loved. And to be loved is to burn. And to burn is to exist. Off and on.