poets-from-kentucky

"The song birds are the sweetest In Kentucky; The thoroughbreds are the fleetest In Kentucky; Mountains tower proudest, Thunder peals the loudest, The landscape is the grandest — And politics — the damnedest In Kentucky."

"I am a farmer singing at the plow"

"My dad always told us never to live where we could see the smoke from another man's chimney. He told us we should never live so close to another's house that the chickens would mingle in the woods."

"The splendor of Silence,—of snow-jeweled hills and of ice."

"The way of the Wind is a strange, wild way."

"They say that man is mighty, He governs land and sea; He wields a mighty scepter O'er lesser powers than he; But a mighty power and stronger, Man from his throne hath hurled, For the hand that rocks the cradle Is the hand that rules the world."

"If this be all, for which I've listened long, Oh, spirit of the dew! You did not sing to Shelley such a song As Shelley sung to you."

"All the glories of the sunset, In the sunrise one may see; That which others call the dawning Is the night for you and me."

"Yet, with this ruined Old World for a nest, Worm-eaten through and through,-"

"This was your butterfly, you see— His fine wings made him vain: The caterpillars crawl, but he Passed them in rich disdain.— My pretty boy says, “Let him be Only a worm again!"

"There stretch'd a sleeping army. One by one, They took their places until thousands met; No leader's stars flash'd on before, and none Lean'd on his sword or stagger'd with his gun -- I wonder if their feet have rested yet!"

"Other suns will shine as golden, Other skies be just as blue; Other south winds blow as softly, Gently drinking up the dew."

"My mother says I must not pass Too near that glass; She is afraid that I will see A little witch that looks like me, With a red mouth to whisper low The very thing I should not know."

"They darted down and rose up like a wave Or buzzed impetuously as before; One would have thought the corpse was held a slave To living by the life it bore!"

"What is the flesh and blood compounded of But a few moments in the life of time? This prowling of the cells, litigious love, Wears the long claw of flesh-arguing crime."

"Now remember courage, go to the door, Open it and see whether coiled on the bed Or cringing by the wall, a savage beast Maybe with golden hair, with deep eyes Like a bearded spider on a sunlit floor Will snarl—and man can never be alone."

"Uncle Sam's other province."

"Then I hid me close to the reedy tarn, Where the mammoth came to drink; Through brawn and bone I drave the stone And slew him upon the brink."

"Thus life by life and love by love We passed through the cycles strange, And breath by breath and death by death We followed the chain of change. Till there came a time in the law of life When o’er the nursing sod, The shadows broke and soul awoke In a strange, dim dream of God."

"Loud I howled through the moonlit wastes, Loud answered our kith and kin; From west and east to the crimson feast The clan came tramping in."

"When you were a tadpole and I was a fish In the Paleozoic time, And side by side on the ebbing tide We sprawled through the ooze and slime, Or skittered with many a caudal flip Through the depths of the Cambrian fen, My heart was rife with the joy of life, For I loved you even then."

"Mindless we lived and mindless we loved And mindless at last we died; And deep in the rift of the Caradoc drift We slumbered side by side. The world turned on in the lathe of time, The hot lands heaved amain, Till we caught our breath from the womb of death And crept into light again."

"Croaking and blind, with our three-clawed feet Writing a language dumb, With never a spark in the empty dark To hint at a life to come."

"I carved that fight on a reindeer bone With rude and hairy hand; I pictured his fall on the cavern wall That men might understand. For we lived by blood and the right of might Ere human laws were drawn, And the age of sin did not begin Till our brutal tusks were gone."

"To weld the theory of soul-transmigration to the reality of evolution was an inspiration that, coming to Langdon Smith in the midst of a busy life, nevertheless sung itself into his heart with a wealth of poetic meaning and suggestion that found its ultimate expression in verses which so securely link his name with those whom no passing moment can plunge into obscurity. … The crowning glory of "Evolution" is, perhaps, the manner in which he interwove throughout his masterpiece of imagination a golden thread of romance that becomes more and more lustrous as the story unfolds. He linked inseparably physical life and spiritual life, the so-called vital and eternal sparks, as, into the web of the lives that evolve, he wove the woof of love and brought them down through the ages as one."

"Ten seconds into the century, the first issue of the New York Journal of 1 January 1901 fell from the newspaper’s complex of fourteen high-speed presses. The first issue was rushed by automobile across pavements slippery with mud and rain to a waiting express train, reserved especially for the occasion. The newspaper was folded into an engraved silver case and carried aboard by Langdon Smith, a young reporter known for his vivid prose style. At speeds that reached eighty miles an hour, the special train raced through the darkness to Washington, D.C., and Smith’s rendezvous with the president, William McKinley. … the Journal exulted: A banner headline spilled across the front page of the 2 January 1901 issue, asserting the Journal's distinction of having published "the first Twentieth Century newspaper. . . in this country," and that the first issue had been delivered at considerable expense and effort directly to McKinley."

"Yet happy we lived and happy we loved, And happy we died once more; Our forms were rolled in the clinging mold Of a Neocomian shore. The eons came and the eons fled And the sleep that wrapped us fast Was riven away in a newer day And the night of death was past."

"And, oh! what beautiful years were these When our hearts clung each to each; When life was filled and our senses thrilled In the first faint dawn of speech."

"I was thewed like an Auroch bull And tusked like the great cave bear; And you, my sweet, from head to feet Were gowned in your glorious hair."

"I flaked a flint to a cutting edge And shaped it with brutish craft; I broke a shank from the woodland lank And fitted it, head and haft."

"God wrought our souls from the Tremadoc beds And furnished them wings to fly; We sowed our spawn in the world's dim dawn, And I know that it shall not die, Though cities have sprung above the graves Where the crook–bone men made war And the ox–wain creaks o'er the buried caves Where the mummied mammoths are."

"Our love is old, our lives are old, And death shall come amain; Should it come today, what man may say We shall not live again?"

"For we know the clod, by the grace of God Will quicken with voice and breath; And we know that Love, with gentle hand Will beckon from death to death."

"Then as we linger at luncheon here O'er many a dainty dish, Let us drink anew to the time when you Were a tadpole and I was a fish."

"And that was a million years ago In a time that no man knows; Yet here tonight in the mellow light We sit at Delmonico's. Your eyes are deep as the Devon springs, Your hair is dark as jet, Your years are few, your life is new, Your soul untried, and yet —"

"I don't think that the Negro problem in America can be even discussed coherently without bearing in mind its context; its context being the history, traditions, customs, the moral assumptions and preoccupations of the country; in short, the general social fabric. Appearances to the contrary, no one in America escapes its effects and everyone in America bears some responsibility for it. I believe this the more firmly because it is the overwhelming tendency to speak of this problem as though it were a thing apart. But in the work of Faulkner, in the general attitude and certain specific passages in Robert Penn Warren, and, most significantly, in the advent of Ralph Ellison, one sees the beginnings-at least-of a more genuinely penetrating search."

"Man is conceived in sin and born in corruption and he passeth from the stink of the didie to the stench of the shroud. There is always something."

"Such fable ours! However sweet, That earlier hope had, if fulfilled, Been but child's pap and toothless meat — And meaning blunt and deed unwilled, And we but motes that dance in light And in such light gleam like the core Of light, but lightless, are in right Blind dust that fouls the unswept floor For, no: not faith by fable lives, But from the faith the fable springs — It never is the song that gives Tongue life, it is the tongue that sings; And sings the song. Then, let the act Speak, it is the unbetrayable Command, if music, let the fact Make music's motion; us, the fable."

"What glass unwinking gives our trust Its image back, what echo names The names we hurl at namelessness?"

"Then let us turn now — you to me And I to you — and hand to hand Clasp, even though our fable be Of strangers met in a strange land Who pause, perturbed, then speak and know That speech, half lost, can yet amaze Joy at the root; then suddenly grow Silent, and on each other gaze."

"If you could not accept the past and its burden, there was no future, for without one there cannot be the other, and [...] if you could accept the past you might hope for the future, for only out of the past can you make the future."

"In separateness only does love learn definition."

"In silence the heart raves. It utters words Meaningless, that never had A meaning. I was ten, skinny, red-headed, Freckled. In a big black Buick, Driven by a big grown boy, with a necktie, she sat In front of the drugstore, sipping something Through a straw. There is nothing like Beauty. It stops your heart.It Thickens your blood. It stops your breath. It Makes you feel dirty. You need a hot bath. I leaned against a telephone pole, and watched. I thought I would die if she saw me."

"I don’t expect you’ll hear me writing any poems to the greater glory of Ronald and Nancy Reagan."

"Everything seems an echo of something else."

"Tell me a story. In this century, and moment, of mania, Tell me a story. Make it a story of great distances, and starlight. The name of the story will be Time, But you must not pronounce its name. Tell me a story of deep delight."

"The lack of a sense of history is the damnation of the modern world."

"How could I exist in the same world with that brightness? Two years later she smiled at me. She Named my name. I thought I would wake up dead."

"The end of man is knowledge but there's one thing he can't know. He can't know whether knowledge will save him or kill him. He will be killed, all right, but he can't know whether he is killed because of the knowledge which he has got or because of the knowledge which he hasn't got and which if he had it would save him."

"What is a poem but a hazardous attempt at self-understanding? It is the deepest part of autobiography."