“You are the butterfly and you are gone.”

Outside my window
sienna eyes of towhee
true gift of winter
No roomful of gifts—
many Christmases have passed
without my father
Ribbons of white glitter
against wintry blue sky
 murmur of snow geese
“I think poetry must stay open all night in beautiful cellars.”
“Words are alive — cut them and they bleed.”
“Poetry is the utterance of deep and heart-felt truth:
the true poet is near the oracle.”
“All night wild impulses
The only way to find a path
is to set fire to your life.”
“Poetry heals the wounds inflicted by reason.”
“A poet must achieve a balance between solitude and solidarity, between feeling
and action, between intimacy of mankind and the revelation of nature.”
“We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospection.”
“Poetry is sort of a homecoming.”
“The only thing that can save the world is the reclaiming of the awareness of the world. That’s what poetry does.”
“The poetry of the earth is never dead.”
“Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.”
“Wine is bottled poetry.”
“Poetry is like a bird, it ignores all frontiers.”
“Poetry is the eternal graffiti written in the heart of everyone.”
“A poet looks at the world the way a man looks at a woman.”
“Poetry is a lion because it eats and intensifies natural speech.”
“Always be a poet, even in prose.”
“You are the butterfly and you are gone.”
“Poetry is from the frontiers of consciousness.”
“The Kings who have died one by one are now reborn in poet’s hearts.”
“You are the butterfly and you are gone.”
A poet and writer of the natural world, Terri Glass mentored under William Stafford and Robert Bly.