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Beauty is the sole legitimate province of the poem.-Edgar Allan Poe

Poetry is when emotion has found its thought and thought has found words--Robert Frost

Poetry is an echo, asking a shadow to dance--Carl Sandburg

I have nothing to say, I am saying it, and that is poetry--John Cage

You will find poetry nowhere unless you bring some of it with you--Joseph Joubert

Poetry is what in a poem makes you laugh, cry, prickle, be silent, makes your toe nails twinkle, makes you want to do this or that or nothing, makes you know that you are alone in the unknown world, that your bliss and suffering is forever shared and forever all your own. ~Dylan Thomas

joybragi84
Jun 10, 20221 min read

A Poem from about Fifteen Years Ago on Our Fifteenth Anniversary


Poem for Kellie


I have mortgaged my life, and I’ve wasted my time.

I’ve made many decisions with no reason nor rhyme.

I have valued my love with the wandering wind

That carries no weight yet makes promises bend.

There’s a great lack of faith in what I’ve lived before

The vows made for always are forever no more,

And they never could last as words carved in a stone,

For when I sought assurance, I stood all alone.

Yet, in this, our love, I can warm near your fire,

I can bask in a passion that comforts my soul,

I can fill empty space with refreshing desire,

Let you take my torn pieces and remake me whole.

K_____, you are the rosy dawn of a splendid new day

And I simply cannot find more worthy words to say.


I originally wrote this poem about fifteen or sixteen year ago. It is hard for me to remember which. Of course, I made some changes to it today because I am much more concerned about craftsmanship than I was, and I am not being prideful when I say that I am a much better poet than I was even fifteen years ago.

These words do no quite fit that life that Kellie and I have together now. Old times, rough times, bad times in my life are pretty much forgotten. Still, every day with Kellie is a splendid day, and she has remade me into a whole person, so that part works. Enjoy!

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I find that I cannot exist without Poetry--without eternal poetry--half the day will not do--the whole of it--I began with a little, but habit has made me a Leviathan.-John Keats

We do not quite say that the new is more valuable because it fits in; but its fitting in is a test of its value.-T. S. Eliot

A man may praise and praise, but no one recollects but that which pleases.-George Gordon, Lord Byron

The great beauty of poetry is that it makes everything in every place interesting.-John Keats

Our faulty elder poets sacrificed the passion and passionate flow of poetry to the subtleties of intellect and to the stars of wit; the moderns to the glare and glitter of a perpetual, yet broken and heterogeneous imagery, or rather to an amphibious something, made up, half of image, and half of abstract meaning. The one sacrificed the heart to the head; the other both heart and head to point and drapery.-S. T. Coleridge

The purpose of rhythm, it has always seemed to me, is to prolong the moment of contemplation, the moment when we are both asleep and awake, which is the one moment of creation.-W. B. Yeats

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